Window API. Lightweight windows are nice because they won’t appear in the taskbar/dock.  Utility windows don’t even have title bars and are nice for toolbars or similar things. You can have transparent windows so that the only content you’ll see is the Flex/HTML content you put in there.

Transparent windows require that you build your own functionality for window handling: Closing, minimizing, moving, resizing, etc. Now, when you use custom chrome, you can use Scale-9 in Flash/Flex to make it really easy to handle how resizing of the graphic works. You can do this with the <mx:canvas> tags in Flex.

HTML Control. WebKit is entirely integrated into the Flash Rendering Pipeline. Using the bridge, you can use functionality in either JavaScript or ActionScript and use it in the other environment: AS called within JavaScript; JavaScript called within AS.

File I/O. Full read/write access within the access provided the user running the OS. Have asynchronous and synchronous versions of the API. So quick and small file access can be done in a synchronous manner quickly, and longer access can be done asynchronously to maintain a quality user experience. Use standard native file dialogs: Save, select, select multiple, directory.

File I/O can save not just text/binary stuff, but you can read/write serialized AS objects. So, you can create an AS object with the info you need, then very rapidly write it out and have it very easy to read back in as that object.  Just use the writeObject() method of the filestream! Similarly, just use loadObject() when reading.  To make this work, you will need to add a tad of metadata to the object to make it work. Another caveat, the data will not be human-readable. But if human-readability is not important, this is much more rapid for writing a lot of data than it would be to save in some text or XML format and needing methods to write out and read back in the data.

Another solution could be to write this kind of data to the database via the database API. But sometimes that may be overkill, plus this can write files anywhere.

Database. A fully-embedded SQLite database engine. You’re accessing a local database. This is not for accessing remote databases. To do that, you’ll want a webservice that provides access to that database.  This database support is great for providing online/offline support. You can sync the information locally and then just utilize the local version.

One note: Every database function will be a separate transaction. If you have hundreds/thousands of database functions to perform, wrap them into one transaction so that the filesystem can do the file transaction more efficiently. In his sample, writing 1,000 database records took 2.3 seconds with no transactions; it took 0.1 second with transactions.

When handling database connectivity, you will: (a) Point to the database file. (b) If it doesn’t exist, do the code to create the database. (c) Do your database statements.