Thanks Jonathan! I have a new year’s resolution to make an AIR app and this will be the place I turn for early help!

Thanks Jonathan. I’ve never really got around to get into AIR. This guide might just be my way in.

I wasn’t aware it ran on webkit! Good news!

Great article Jonathon! Makes me want to have a crack at AIR now.

Just got to think of something to make!

Excellent, I’ve been thinking of dabbling in AIR for a little while but didn’t really know where to start after firing up a project in Aptana. Cheers :-)

I have one fundamental question though – your example HTML throws a button in the HTML without any form etc. Does this mean that HTML in AIR doesn’t need to be the validated, semantic HTML we’re all used to developing? What about DOCTYPES, head sections, and all that stuff? Basically – do we still use the ‘standards’ approach, or do we revert to merrily throwing stuff around? I don’t understand what AIR means for my design approach or for accessibility.

My big holdup with JS/HTML AIR apps is the sandboxing issue. It’d be so nice to just use prototype or something to get things done, but the inability to use eval() in places (like evaluating scripts in Ajaxed in content) is mind-numbingly annoying. I started to try to build a sandbox bridge, but by then I just decided to build the thing using Flex.

Has anyone found a good way to setup the sandboxing so it’s easy to use JavaScript libraries – especially those that rely on eval() in places?

Thanks for the great demo Jonathan.

The sandbox example from Adobe should meet your needs. Snitter used this approach originally and had 90% of the application running within the sandbox. The only hassle is defining the API to pass data back and forth from the application sandbox. Oh, and initialization routines have to be considered: first the iframe loads, then the parent window. How you attach things to the API has to be done in a specific order. (I believe the sandbox example has this covered.)

@John: I’m with you: I wasn’t too happy when I realized that I wouldn’t be able to use the jQuery Slider UI library for my color picker AIR app (http://colorpicker.riaforge.org) because of the sandbox. The sandbox examples I found were too obtuse for me, so I ended up writing my own sliding functions. Fortunately, a lot of the basic jQuery selector functions work without a sandbox, and you can get away with using the standard onLoad JS event instead of the jQuery Ready event to initialize your event handlers.

@Jonathan: very cool post. I’m much more comfortable programming in HTML/CSS/JS than I am with Flex, so I’m always happy when I come across a well-written AIR example in those technologies.

This is great, for begainer, I am trying to do a Dash-board application which is playing in desktop I dont have idea about, sql server, can it possible to making with MS ODBS
I mean ASP and ACCESS, I am finding …… if u have any idea please let me know….