Folks in this forum know that I've been pretty much on the Adobe Flex train - have overseen development of Flex software for a couple of years now.
More lately am dealing with AIR development specifically. Before the Flex development was very much now RIA web app focused. However, now the emphasis is on desktop (AIR) with a hybrid RIA web app approach (a portion is installed as AIR desktop app, but significant portions still load as Flex forms from a web server). As such am discovering some of the short-comings of AIR. The obvious comparison point is the Java JRE. The most obvious and most often complained about shortcoming of AIR is that there is no API for launching other arbitrary apps in their own process context. In our case we actually want to build a portal program launcher in AIR. Yes, some of these will be URLs to web apps, but some of them are also desktop apps. Another is that even though AIR has File and FileStream classes for interacting with local files, there does not appear to be any provision for async interaction with stdin, stdout, or stderr. It would be great to launch an AIR as a subprocess and to do interprocess communication via just using stdin/stdout (I've written a zillion powerful multi-processing perl applications along these lines). Instead folks end up resorting to some agreed upon localhost port and doing socket i/o. Doing a stdin/stdout between parent and child processes would be much better, as would be performant and trouble free from configuration and security standpoint. There are several projects that have emerged that attempt to buck up the deficiencies in AIR: FluorineFx Aperture Shu Merapi It's interesting that such a cottage industry has sprung up. The Merapi project is a Java to AIR bridge. It actually does asyn messaging between Java code and AIR code where they done some sort of AMF implementation to marshal objects between Java and ActionScript3. Turns out there's very keen interest in this kind of thing. A lot of folks are very much sold on the Flex development model - it is really nice, productive, and delivers great results in terms of the GUI. Yet when you start working on the desktop - well, AIR tends to leave a lot to be desired in terms of maturity. Those of us from the Java world know things could be much richer. It would be great to combine the strengths of both - hence solutions such as Merapi. The obvious take-away for Sun here is that some of their marketing message about the strengths of Java (inclusive of JavaFX) is that the Java SE is indeed very mature and feature laden. So a word of advice to Sun - start concentrating your marketing message for JavaFX in the space that Adobe AIR is targeting. To do that though, they're going to have to include something like Webkit in the Java SE so they can also have a first rate HTML rendering solution (and a fast JavaScript interpretor that's competitive to Google's V8). Adobe needs to bolster AIR with more features while Sun needs to buck up the web programming story of using HTML/JavaScript/DOM in combination to JavaFX. So here is opportunity for some good old fashion big vendor competition that seeks to win the hearts and minds of developers. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
