A few days ago I went to the Sydney installment of the Adobe AIR / Flex 3 pre-release tour, where Daniel Dura, Adobe’s “Platform Evangelist” (which apparently doesn’t mean a born again new romantic, it means someone who spreads the word about the Adobe platform, which means, I guess, the Flash Player and related development tools, and now AIR) who battled jetlag to tell us some things about the new products.
I must admit I was impressed. I am often frustrated by Adobe, but it looks like have come up with the goods this time. Flex 3 will come with goodies like auto-generation of web service code stubs from WSDL, memory profiling, and plenty of other goodies. The more exciting part of the talk was about the AIR runtime, which allows for the creation of “desktop RIAs” - with elements of Flash, HTML and JavaScript (using WebKit) all interacting on a cross-platform desktop VM. It also comes with new APIs for working with the filesystem, and even local databases (thanks to SQLite, the ANSI-SQL compliant embedded database library with which it comes bundled).
What would be a great third-party project to accompany the AIR platform would be a simple JDBC app for talking to remote databases, and an ActionScript API to talk to it. Someone should get onto it!
As Daniel Tome points out, AIR will be the nail in the coffin for third-party systems that attempt to make binary apps out of Flash apps, like Zinc.
The slides from the tour are now online, thanks to Ben Forta.
[...] UPDATE ** Thanks Joshua for pointing out the slides from the tour by Ben [...]