Tom Yager, writer of the Ahead of the Curve column in InfoWorld, wrote up a nice article about AIR entitled AIR gets rich apps right. Touting Adobe’s credentials through their past record, he indicated that Adobe is a great candidate for accomplishing what AIR is intended to do: Get that web technology to the desktop environment untethered from the web browser.

I’ve always loved Tom Yager and find his columns very interesting (although the Intel/AMD discussions lose my interest). It’s great to see him praising AIR.

The following are my notes during the Adobe AIR Local Data Storage Options webinar that was presented during Adobe Developer Week. It was presented by Greg Hamer and the slides and demo code are already online.

Before getting started, note how Microsoft and Adobe are taking two different approaches: Microsoft is trying to bring the .Net desktop development community to the web. Adobe is conversely trying to bring web developers to the desktop! (Kevin Lynch)

There are four main options for AIR local storage: Local Shared Objects, File System, Encrypted Local Store, and the embedded SQLite database. Shared Objects are available in the Flash Player as well; all of these options are obviously available in AIR. Note that the data size limitation for Shared Objects does not exist in the AIR runtime!

Performance considerations. Shared Objects read and write very quickly. File system access and encrypted local stores are typically be slow in writing. Embedded SQLite databases are typically the best combination of speed and random access of items. Greg highlighted the AIR_LocalStorage_Demo app created by Jason Williams that demonstrates the speeds of the four storage methods.

Local Shared Objects. You can serialize memory resident data structures. Great! However, it runs in synchronous mode.

Encrypted Local Store. Used to store sensitive data. The price is the slow write speeds.  Also runs in synchronous mode. All data is serialized using ByteArray.

File System. Obviously important for management of documents. Can run in sync and async mode. The File and FileStream objects work together to point to a file and read/write data. The File object helps remove you from the pain of dealing with Mac vs. Windows environments with properties like File.userDirectory, File.documents.Directory, File.desktopDirectory, etc. It also has methods for opening Open and Save dialog boxes native to the environment as well as copying/moving/deletion methods.

Embedded SQLite Database.  Nice thing about them is that they are self-contained in a single file and require no external software installation to begin using them (support is built into the AIR runtime). Even supports transactions. And the database supports large amounts of data: SQLite has a theoretical limit of over 2TB. Supports ANSI-SQL 92.

However, it’s not a full-blown enterprise database server, obviously. So you lose things like stored procedures, enforcing data type constraints, foreign key constraints, and primary keys must be integers. It also isn’t a multiuser environment.

Session evaluation. I am unhappy to say that I was disappointed with the session. It was high-level, the coverage of code samples (when they weren’t passed over completely) consisted of merely reading the code back to us. I recommend viewing the recording if you have zero knowledge of data storage in Flex and AIR, as it would serve as a decent first-baby-step introduction for you.

Recently at work, we in IT were puzzled when a fellow employee called to report that the iTunes Store would not load on iTunes for computers on our network. The problem occurred only on our network and was not Mac or Windows specific.

Fiddler came to the rescue. Fiddler is a freeware tool that logs and allows you to inspect all HTTP traffic between your computer and the network (and thus Internet). I first heard about it at a conference when learning how to debug Ajax applications. It was especially useful when doing so with IE since there was no Firebug for IE (ahem, this is before the days of Firebug Lite and other such tools). I never really looked at it closely because, well, why do that when you could use Firebug and Firefox?

Well, it came in handy for this problem. The HTTP traffic between iTunes and the iTunes Store is less apparent since it is behind Apple’s veil of the iTunes interface. Fiddler revealed the exact domain names and in fact full URLs that were being requested, as well as the returned results. It was immediately apparent that our Barracuda Web Filter was blocking the request, so iTunes just reported that it could not connect to the iTunes Store. When we white-listed the requested domain, everything began functioning fine.

Everything had been working fine with iTunes in the past. But Barracuda updates its black list automatically. So when Barracuda apparently added certain iTunes Store domain names into its black list, namely phobos.apple.com, our hardware eventually updated its lists and began blocking iTunes Store traffic on our network.

Lesson #1: Beware the pitfalls of subscription services like Barracuda’s. They have their benefits, but they certainly can catch you unawares. Lesson #2: Use Fiddler. It is great for a lot more than web development debugging. It’s a convenient early stage network debugging tool. Lesson #3: Don’t discount the supposed dross at conferences that you think doesn’t apply to you. Perhaps years after you hear about something, you might finally come to have a need for it.

Boy, 16 Sector is drawing this thing out longer than I’d hoped. They’ve got something up their sleeve for the few Apple II enthusiasts around us.

Yes, a new piece of Apple II hardware will be coming our way very shortly. The cat’s almost out of the bag! The good ol’ days of the Apple //e and Apple IIgs are what really make me nostalgic. I even purchased an Apple IIgs recently on eBay and I’m just saving it in the box with plans to break it out when I get around to finishing my new attic office space.

For clues on the odd antics of the 16 Sector site, check the commentary at A2Central.com in their post, “More 16 Sector riddles“.

p.s. A big “hear! hear!” goes out for that post in regard to the return of the great Carrington Vanston of 1MHz fame!