If you haven't heard of Adobe AIR yet, you will soon. It is a runtime that allows developers to deploy web applications to the desktop, cross platform (well, I say that, but Air is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X, but Adobe says that the "Linux release of Adobe Air is under development" and will be released to "public alpha on our [Adobe's] Labs website in early 2008 in order to collect feedback from Linux developers").
After a fairly long incubation period in Adobe Labs, AIR 1.0 was released today. That said, AIR is already somewhat proven, as developers have been working with it for quite some time now and several large companies are already taking advantage of the technology.
What are the benefits of Adobe AIR? Well, other than the obvious (write once for the web and desktop, utilize your web development skills, etc.), AIR provides a number of benefits that you only get with a traditional desktop application, including:
- the ability for an application to run in the background.
- the ability to run while disconnected from the internet.
- full desktop integration, including access to the clipboard and system tray.
- access to a local database.
- increased application response time.
If you don't buy into the hype, I understand, but I encourage you to at least check it out. Here are some good links to check out:
And in closing, if you want to work with Adobe AIR (or you do a lot of front-end development with JavaScript), you should check out the outstanding Aptana IDE. It is the best IDE for doing AJAX development that I've found, and has support for Adobe AIR development. I discovered it several months ago while looking for a Ruby on Rails IDE, and haven't looked back since.
I expect that I'll be playing with AIR sometime soon, although most of the development that I'm currently doing (web map development) doesn't really fit into AIR. If I do play around, I'll post here.