Flex 3 and AIR are officially launched today.
Robert Scoble has posted video from the launch. The implications of the release of AIR, a cross-platform runtime for deployment of desktop apps using web development technologies (Flex/ActionScript, HTML, ECMAScript) is much more significant than the latest Flex release, nice though its features undoubtedly are.
Hank Williams overstates the case (“RIP Windows”) but the ability to write once, run anywhere (or at least any OS for which Adobe releases the AIR platform, which at the moment is Windows, OS X and Linux) delivers the promise of client-side Java in a much more developer-friendly manner (compare the decline and fall of Swing). As Ryan Stewart points out, being able to deploy to both web and AIR is a “bridge between web and desktop”.
The devil is, as always, in the details. In my personal AIR project I am currently thinking about the best way to be able to write a single application that differs only in its main application MXML file – with context-sensitive components, effectively, that have different behaviour depending on what they’re compiled as part of …
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