Also, air provides for certification of apps.

AIR is a little bit more than running a browser without the frame, but that’s not a bad description of the core idea. The more positive spin is that you can build connected apps with filesystem access (and drag-drop desktop interactions) using your skillset as a web engineer. For a lot of folks, that’s a compelling story — and for you, I realize, it’s probably not.

If you think of an application like a mail client, though, I think there’s some obvious synergy with the AIR approach. As opposed to a web browser interface, you could deploy the client as an AIR app that sits on the desktop, saves messages for offline reading, stays open all day long, etc. In such an application, the browser chrome rarely makes much sense.

These are just my own thoughts on this, in any event — I don’t represent Adobe and am not trying to promote AIR explicitly. Rather, for YUI developers who are interested, our objective is to ensure that YUI plays well in the AIR sandbox.

-Eric

So what does AIR add to that? Does it have a built-in web server?

Access to the local file system is nice, but you can already get that in certain browsers (IE) if you have been granted permissions.

I’m just failing to see the compelling reason. Is AIR just running a browser without the frame and back/forward buttons?

The big difference here is that you’re writing the app, including its UI and all of its guts, in the languages that as a web app developer you know really well: JavaScript, CSS, DOM API, etc. You can use all your favorite JavaScript libraries (we’re partial to YUI, but obviously lots of them work just fine). You can use Flash and Flex where you want to. And, as with any desktop app, you can add to the mix access to the filesystem for offline work.

Is it less responsive? That’s possible. AIR is a 1.0 release, so it’s early days yet. But the prospect that you can bring all of your webdev skills to the desktop is an interesting one, and I suspect we’ll see a lot of interesting possibilities emerge that just aren’t doable in a pure browser environment.

Regards,
-Eric

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that enables web developers to use their existing web development skills, code and tools to build and deploy rich web applications and content to the desktop.”

What this really means is that you can use all of your existing skills as a web-app developer in the creation of desktop apps. Not only do you have access to your basic DHTML layer, you can also use AIR-specific APIs that give you things like file-system access. And your app will run across all the OS platforms Adobe supports.

-Eric

Couldn’t find anything than generalities on Adobe’s website, so perhaps someone can give me a pointer here.

How is AIR conceptually different from client side java they were jamming down our throats in the 90′s? Is AIR “easier” to develop in etc.? I don’t know anything about AIR, so apologies if this is obvious.

The test app was nice, but it actually was less-responsive on my computer than a browser-based app (I thought it would be the opposite). I had the same experience when I tried ebay’s AIR app (and the lack of responsiveness was more-noticable). Hope adobe looking into that ;)

Anyway, thanks to the folks at YUI for a fantastic framework, and most important, development options!