If you had anything to do with software development, you may be familiar with the saying - "Develop once and run on any platform". This quote was made popular by Sun Microsystems when it created the Java language. Any application developed using Java can be compiled on any platform and made to run on any other platform without any recompilation. In other words Java applications are OS and architecture independent as long as there is a Java runtime environment (or JRE) installed on the targeted platform in which you decide to run the application.
When I first read about Adobe AIR, the one thing that struck me was its similarity with JRE. But if you negate the "compile once run anywhere" aspect, there is little in common between Adobe AIR and Java (JRE). Adobe AIR is a runtime environment which allows rich internet applications developed using HTML, JavaScript, Flash or Flex to be deployed on the client machines and to run them seamlessly.
The advantage for the end user is that he can install and run an AIR application irrespective of the type of OS he uses as long as he has Adobe AIR installed on his machine.
Two weeks back, Adobe released a version of Adobe AIR for Linux. While this is cause for much rejoicing, the package is still in alpha stage and is not feature complete. More over, there are a few prerequisites in installing Linux version of AIR, them being :
Fig: Adobe AIR installation setup for Linux
Fig: Installing an AIR application- Officially, it can be installed only on the following Linux distributions : Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE and Ubuntu. But since Ubuntu is derived from Debian, I presume, Debian users can also install it on their machine (I haven't checked). And so should numerous other Linux distributions derived from Debian.
- AIR currently supports only Gnome or KDE desktop environments.
- Only RPM and Debian package management systems are supported.
- There is support for transparency in AIR applications but you have to enable Compiz or equivalent compositing window managers.
I was able to install Adobe AIR on my machine running Ubuntu Gutsy and it was a seamless process. The runtime installer is a binary file for which I had to give executable privileges. Double clicking on it started the installation process. Once it was finished, I was able to install AIR applications on Linux in the same way you install software on Windows. AIR application setups all have a '.air' extension and they are owned by Adobe AIR. You can also uninstall the application by running the installer again. In Ubuntu, the AIR applications are installed in the /opt directory by default though you can provide an alternate path too.
Fig: An RSS reader AIR application running on UbuntuAdobe AIR for Linux alpha will expire on March 1st 2009 but a final Linux version of AIR which is at par with the ones on Windows and Mac can be expected some time in the second half of this year.
Linux version of Adobe AIR does not run all AIR applications yet. A list of AIR applications which are known to run on Linux can be found here.
