Developing Flex applications for AIR 1.1

Updated (Aug. 18, 2008): Adobe recommends that you use the Flex 3.1 SDK to target Adobe AIR 1.1. This SDK is included in the Flex Builder 3.0.1 update. You will not need to do anything further if you use this SDK.

Adobe AIR 1.1 is a small release that adds international support to AIR applications. In the future, the Flex team will release official updates to both the Flex SDK and Flex Builder that include the latest version of AIR. However, this particular release is happening off of the Flex release cycle, so to leverage the new functionality you must take some manual steps.

The Flex SDK is currently including support for AIR 1.1 in the 3.0.2 stable build. A stable build of the Flex SDK is one that has gone through an approval process but has not been tested as extensively as a milestone build. The fully supported 3.1 milestone build is planned for mid-August (you can track milestone progress on the Flex open source site). Download the 3.0.2 build from hereand install it by unzipping it to a location of your choice.

If you're using Flex Builder, add the newly downloaded SDK as an Installed SDK. For instructions, see http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/build_6.html#162812.

If your application uses Flex Builder Professional features such as data visualization components or automated testing, you will need to copy those elements from the 3.0 SDK that came with Flex Builder into your newly downloaded SDK. The relevant files that you need to copy are:

• <sdkdir>/frameworks/libs/automation*.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/libs/datavisualization.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/locale/en_US/automation*.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/locale/en_US/datavisualization_rb.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/locale/ja_JP/automation*.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/locale/ja_JP/datavisualization_rb.swc
• <sdkdir>/frameworks/rsls/datavisualization_3.0.0.477.*
• <sdkdir>/fbpro (if you care about source)

For any AIR application that you are working on you will need to update your application descriptor (<applicationname>-app.xml) and on the root tag change xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0" to xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.1".

There is a bug in Flex Builder 3.0 that prevents it from using the AIR 1.1 descriptor by default, even if you create a new project using the 3.0.2 SDK. Because of that, you must manually update the descriptor for any AIR project that you create if you wish it to target AIR 1.1.

That's all the information you should need. However please refer to some additional articles and documentation that you may find useful.

• AIR 1.1 FAQ (PDF, 428K)
• Building multilingual Flex applications on Adobe AIR
• Developing Adobe AIR 1.1 applications with Adobe Flex 3