I went to the on AIR Bus Tour in Chicago tonight. Here are my notes from the main presentation.

Enabling more powerful RIAs: Need good runtime performance. This was improved with AS3. Need good development model. Flash is scary for developers. So Flex enables developers to write Flash apps in code. Bridged gap between Flash and developers. Finally, need a desktop runtime. This is where AIR comes in. Web is great, but sometimes you need that desktop connectivity.

AIR tries to be “webby”. So, it’s cross-platform, has an easy install experience. Basically a web-enabled desktop experience. And can use Flash, but can also use your standard HTML/JavaScript skills. And can even combine Flash and JavaScript together with a bridge. So do JavaScript when you want, because it’s more comfortable, but then tap into some Flash functionality when it is needed because you can’t do it from JavaScript. Even supplies a local database functionality: SQLite. So that mentality in web development, which means an expectation to have database connectivity, can continue in the desktop app.

Timeframe. Flex 3 Beta and CF 8 Beta have already come and gone, so has AIR Beta 1. At MAX, we’ll see AIR Beta 2, and of course we already have CF 8 proper. AIR 1.0 is scheduled for sometime in the beginning of 2008, as is Flex Builder 3.

Deployment. Typical web apps just get put on the webserver and you send the URL. An AIR file is just a zip-based package similar to Java, so you could send the AIR file, but that would require that the user has the AIR runtime installed. As a solution, there is an “Express” installation that is web-based (not hard to do). You send them a link to your app, and it will install the app but also check that the user has the runtime. This addresses the issue of deploying to users who do not currently have AIR on their PC.

Once installed, the AIR app is no different than any other app on the platform it was installed in. In OS X, it appears as a Universal app; in Windows, it is a normal executable. It appears in the Start Menu or Applications folder. If it crashes, it dies on its own, it doesn’t bring down all AIR apps. And so on.

Remember http://www.adobe.com/go/air. That address will always point to all things AIR.

Add’l Notes. The FileTypes node in your application.xml file will let you specify your own filetypes that will be registered with the filesystem! So if your app generates a particular file, you can have your files be double-clickable and open in your AIR app. The AIR runtime is not just a webpage on the desktop. It really is an integrated desktop experience.

JavaScript Development. Developing AIR in HTML/JavaScript is very easy, even though you can’t do it with a built-in functionality that Flex Builder has, as long as you use the SDK stuff Adobe provides. The JavaScript bridge makes it pretty easy to access the Flash-specific functionality. The key in development is just using the ADL and ADT command-line tools that are provided for free. Point ADL to your application.xml file, and it compiles it and runs it on the spot. No problem! We wrote an HTML/JavaScript app that takes some user input and writes it to a file on the desktop in only 6 vital JavaScript lines of code.

Aptana. They recommended Aptana as a great IDE for doing HTML/JavaScript development for AIR, since it has some AIR-specific support. Good to know! I love Aptana already, so that is convenient!

This concluded the initial walkthroughs of developing AIR in Flex and JavaScript. This is exactly what I was looking for to understand the basics of AIR development, which took some of the “scary” mystery out of it.