Adobe AIR Article

Digitally signing Adobe AIR applications

When you're ready to ship an Adobe AIR application, you'll be required to digitally sign it in order for the Adobe AIR installer to install it to the user's system. The Adobe AIR runtime runs with the same user privileges as native applications, allowing local file system access, network operations, bitmap manipulations, local data access, and so on. By requiring your application to be signed, Adobe instills confidence in your customers by validating the source of the application, while giving developers writing these applications known access to the user's system to enable rich Internet applications on the desktop.

Adobe offers a few different ways to build your AIR applications whether you use Flex Builder 3, Flash CS3 Professional, or Dreamweaver CS3. In this article, I'll show you how to sign your Adobe AIR applications for distribution with a digitally signed certificate from an authorized certificate authority (CA). And if you're just getting started with Adobe AIR and don't want to shell out money, you can always sign your application with an untrusted certificate to allow the AIR runtime to install your application as UNVERIFIED publisher to get you through your testing cycle.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the Firefox 2.0 (or later) web browser and one of the following:

Flex Builder 3

• Try
• Buy

Flex 3 SDK and the ADT Application

• Download

Flash CS3 Professional

• Try
• Buy

Adobe AIR update for Flash CS3 Professional

• Download

Dreamweaver CS3

• Try
• Buy

Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3

• Download

Firefox 2.0 web browser

• Available free from Mozilla

Prerequisite knowledge

You should be familiar with building Adobe AIR applications with the development methods of your choice: Flash, Flex, or HMTL and Ajax.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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