Peter Sbarski09 October 2007, 3:00 AM
Adobe is flipping web development on its head: it is encouraging developers to port web apps to the desktop with a new platform called AIR.
Adobe's had a bit of a brainwave, it seems: a system that lets developers use existing web programming skills (such as Flash, Flex, JavaScript and HTML) to create full-blown desktop apps.
The brainwave has been turned into a cross-platform runtime called AIR.
The first public beta of the runtime was released on June 11, 2007, with the second public beta following on October 1, 2007. Although, it hasn't been with us for very long, organizations such as AOL, NASDAQ and eBay are already began using it. Check out the Adobe AIR showcase here.
eBay has released a beta version of eBay Desktop based on Adobe AIR. It can be downloaded from desktop.ebay.com and is supposed to bring the "eBay experience" right to the desktop. But in fact, I found it less annoying than the eBay site. The interface was clean, cheerful and intuitive. Item search and feeds were easy to use and there was even a feature (instant bid alert) not found in the web version (email alerts don't count).
 eBay Desktop: surprisingly not bad |
Of course, there are flaws in eBay Desktop: the inability to set a proxy, select source sites other than ebay.com, and so on, but this is, after all, a beta version.
eBay Desktop is a good application to show off the power of Adobe AIR but what else can AIR do? To answer that question we turned to Adobe's own sample applications. These are by no means exhaustive but they do show what can be done. For example:
- Arise is a pretty cool news aggregator written in ActionScript;
- Bee is desktop blog editor which integrates with WordPress and Flickr;
- Fresh is an RSS feeder created sing AJAX;
- MapCache is a map/direction system which uses Yahoo! Map Web Services;
- Podcast Player is self explanatory;
- RoadFinder combines Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps together;
- Salsa is seamless online storage done via Amazon Simple Storage Service,
There are more sample applications here so go and check them out.
Adobe AIR offers amazing opportunities to developers and it shows that Adobe is working hard to counter the threat that Silverlight poses to its existing Flash business. Everything is moving to the web, so the AIR development model of bringing web applications to the desktop (sans browser window) is an important new milestone in the evolution of web technologies.
If AIR gains more momentum and becomes widespread it may herald the convergence of the web and the desktop like nothing ever before. Get ready for web 3.0 desktop edition.