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March 31, 2008
What AIR/Linux means
What AIR/Linux means: Lots of talk about AIR/Linux today, but the biggest difference from yesterday sort of flew under the radar. You used to be able to code and deliver to the Microsoft stack, or to the Apple stack, or to the Linux stacks... choose a destination, learn its particular methodology, then deliver to that single OS-bound audience. Then the web came, with serverside smarts and later clientside smarts, and all of a sudden you weren't trapped in a stack. You couldn't do as much as you could in WPF or Cocoa, but you could develop on any system, deliver to any system. The two big debits to in-browser work were testing against all the possible HTML/JS runtimes your audience might use, and then, of course, an environment meant for safe browsing must be more restricted in permissions. Back in October 2006, James Ward said something simple that took the pundits awhile to understand: "As of yesterday, for the first time EVER, nearly everyone in the world has access to a FREE, ubiquitous application runtime, and a FREE application development toolkit for that runtime! Of course I'm referring to Flash Player 9 and the free Flex 2 SDK." Now 18 months later, we've got an entirely new application development opportunity available: write on any platform, using the HTML/JS methodology or the SWF methodologies... deliver to any platform and their various browsers... or deliver to the desktop, with abilities beyond those of the browsers. Stick to WPF or Cocoa if you need to work at the device-driver level, or if you need to optimize very complex tasks to the hardware. But if your application lives in the cloud, and you need a smart local desktop client, then the OS really doesn't matter anymore. A Mac developer can create for Windows audiences... a .NET developer can write desktop applications for Linux... and if you don't buy into the Big 2 operating systems then you can still deliver applications to them anyway. All at no extra time or cost. The AIR/Linux release today is a marker for a very significant evolutionary step: We're all just using computers, not particular brands of computers. No more silos... that's the big news.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 31, 2008 07:01 PM
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Comments
yep, it's very exciting. next time i do any kind of desktop app, AIR will be the first thing i try.
Posted by: bunnyhero at March 31, 2008 10:30 PM
Agreed ! But...
AIR needs hardware support, AIR needs COM/USB port communication, because 30% of apps use that kind of features.
Yes, i know you can write a .NET ActiveX .dll, and talk to it with Javascript in AIR, but is that the sollution, i dont think so.
I hope next version of AIR will bring atleast COM port communication or .DLL communication, and most importantly, let us developers choose if our app will be truly cross platform, or not.
My 2 cents.
[jd sez: I hope they take system integration slowly. As we saw with custom HTTP headers, it can be hard to move back a few years later, once an exploit is found.]
Posted by: Ozren at April 1, 2008 03:31 AM
I'm totally excited.
Posted by: Chris Charlton at April 1, 2008 07:40 AM
Ozren, where do you get your statistics about the direct usage of communications and usb ports? Why wouldn't they be supported by virtualised file systems and layered internet usage?
If you want to use a .NET ActiveX control for some reason you obviously want windows so why not just support IE in Windows without worrying about the others? AIR is designed for that, not for a windows fixed world.
Posted by: peter at April 3, 2008 02:46 PM