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Adobe AIR article

 

Developing on Adobe AIR with Aptana Studio


Kevin Sawicki

Kevin Sawicki

Aptana

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Setting up your application
  3. Adding functionality to your application
  4. Testing the application
  5. Exporting the application
Created:
25 February 2008
User Level:
Beginner

Aptana Studio is a free, open source Ajax development environment that offers features such as JavaScript debugging, full HTML/CSS/JS content assist, FTP support, and integrated samples. Aptana Studio also offers a plug-in for Adobe AIR development that combines the full-featured web development environment with complete support for developing, running, and exporting Adobe AIR applications. This plug-in allows web developers to easily transform their web applications into desktop applications by leveraging Adobe AIR, a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to create desktop application written in HTML, JavaScript, and Ajax.

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Isn't this exciting, being able to use your existing web development skills to build desktop applications that can run on both Mac and Windows, have access to the file system, can read and write to a local database, support native menus, system notifications and advanced windowing capabilities such as transparency? For those not accustomed to working with software development kits (SDKs), this excitement can be subdued once you realize that building applications at the command level can be onerous and time consuming. The Adobe AIR plug-in for Aptana Studio takes all the pain out Adobe AIR development, from getting your application up and running to creating certificates and deploying your final application. The plug-in significantly streamlines development and deployment of your Adobe AIR applications as it tries to minimize and circumvent the stumbling blocks encountered when working with the AIR SDK.

The main goal of the Aptana Studio plug-in is to shield the complexity of the AIR SDK thus allowing developers to focus on the content of their applications. This article introduces the various features of the Adobe AIR plug-in for Aptana Studio by showing you how to build a local file system browser sample application using jQuery and the Google Chart API. This sample application can run cross-platform and will enable users to delete items, move them to the trash, and also generate a pie chart of the file size breakdown for the contents of any folder.

Requirements

To follow along with this article you'll need the following software and files

Aptana Studio 1.1 or later

Adobe AIR plug-in for Aptana Studio

Adobe AIR

Sample files:

Prerequisite knowledge

This article is geared towards anyone interested in an using an IDE for Adobe AIR application development. General experience of building applications with HTML, JavaScript, or Ajax using an integrated development environment (IDE) is suggested.

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About the author

Kevin Sawicki is a senior software engineer at Aptana working on Aptana Studio, a JavaScript/HTML/CSS/Ajax IDE. He created the Adobe AIR plug-in for Aptana Studio and has also worked on the plug-in for iPhone development. He is a graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in software engineering.