Smoky Cogs

Most of the online resources for Adobe Air seem to centre around the Flash and Flex components, with relatively few resources for Javascript developers.

As more of a Javascript developer than a Flex developer, I found this little guide to be an invaluable book. In fact, I tend to look in here before I go launch a search in Google.

It covers just about everything you would want to with Adobe Air, and even though, in quite a few cases it does not have the detail I have sometimes needed, it provides a good starting point to search for more information on the Internet or other sources.

This is a much recommended book for Javascript developers wanting to use Adobe Air.

The other nice thing about this book, is that it is available free online from Adobe’s site here, as well as a hardcopy book.

Adobe Air has quite a lot of security restrictions which it imposes on the Javascript trying to run in the sandbox. One of the side effects of this is that ExtJS throws up one of these security violations.

ExtJS 2.3 came with an extension so that it was able to be used within Adobe Air, which managed to bypass this problem, and using this extension, ExtJS works very well in Adobe Air.

However, the latest ExtJS 3.0 does not have this extension built in. According to the forums, they are still working on this. There is, fortunately, a workaround.

I have successfully managed to get ExtJS 3.0 to run in Adobe Air by copying the air extension from the ExtJS 2.3 codebase into the ExtJS 3.0 codebase, and then referencing it appropriately in the html page.

I do have to admit that doing this hack might potentially cause problems if you are trying to use any of the newest features in ExtJS 3.0, but so far have not had any issues.

When the air extension for ExtJS 3.0 does get release, that, of course, would be preferable, but until then, this works for me perfectly.

For the last few weeks I have been playing around with Appcelerator Titanium.

It all began at work where we were researching the best platform to write some client tools for the KnowledgeTree document management software which we produce. Adobe Air was our initial first choice, but after doing a few demos of Titanium versus Air, we have finally settled on Titanium.

Titanium is an awesome platform, and I was rooting for it from the start, so I am very glad we have decided to use it, although, like all things in life, there is a down side.

Titanium is cutting edge. So cutting edge, that the beta release was only released two days before our second demo.
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