Developers' Feedback on AIR

Question

Hello,
I really like AIR and would like to get fellow developers
onboard but it's kinda hard when I take them to the Adobe AIR
website and things don't look as nice as they would other places.
I'm going to share with you some of the things other developers are
saying:
* It's kinda difficult to get basic information or video
clips on what air is all about.The basic introduction and major
features are not clear.
* Website colors are dull and not eye catching.
* Flex seems a bit hard to understand and most of them think
that it's difficult to use the Flash tool to create animations.
That's it. This is some of the feedback I'm getting thus far.
It's up to you guys to decide what you're going to do.
Personally I would like to see a reduction in the distro size
of AIR and speed improvement. It appears that AIR/Flash requires a
lot of resources but I have never tested it fully. I would like to
hear of other users' experience with running serveral AIR/Flash
apps on a PC.
I would also love for AIR to support greater data
connectivity natively without the need to go throuh another Adobe
Product or server:
* MySQL
* MSSQL
* ODBC
* POP3 Email support
* SOAP connections
* WebDAV/LDAP support
* Ability to execute commands from AIR app
* Ability to read/write to COM ports - this would make it
great for working with robotics and other micro chip devices. For
example: Home Automation, Device Timers, etc
* Ability to connect with other servers or server backend
scripts when streaming data. What if I don't have a flash media
server and want yo send the the audio stream to be saved on my
server with PHP?
While it's possible to use low level socket to create these
connections it's not something that most developers will be looking
foward to in a framework. Lack of adequate data connections or
support for such extensions will be a turn of for some developers.
Anyway, you guys have done a great job with AIR thus far but
I how you continue to push the system forward and at a much greater
pace.
PS. The video link on this page is not working for me in IE
or firefox:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/ajax/articles/air_ajax_developers.html

Answer 1

I think Adobe should be carefull in not extending AIR/Flex
into all development areas. Some software projects are clearly not
suited for AIR/Flex, and I think it should remain this way, or
otherwise the clean and elegant model may soon be "poluted" with to
many different things. Like a swish knife that does everything, but
usually not as good as a dedicated tool.
I currently see AIR/Flex as a replacement for the current
AJAX interfaces that tries to mimic the desktop interfaces of our
everyday OS. We need these kind of interfaces for many types of
applications, and I think there is also a big need for it in the
future, as we will base more and more applications in a distributed
fashion, where we can take our environments with us anywhere.
I've been working with AJAX long before the acronym was
invented, and I can only say that it is scary how much work it
actually requires to do even basic things. Besides, it's a model
that is weak in many areas, like execution speed, cross-platform,
browser artifacts, standardisation, etc.
The HTML/JavaScript model model has been mature for
replacement in many years now, and a lot of the AJAX desktop
interfaces we see today, is what I would call totally overkill if
we consider the work required to do them. I know there's libraries
etc. that you can draw on, but these are not easily/naturallly
extendable and will never be, if you compare to flex or similar
fundamentally strong environments. AJAX is also quite difficult to
scale to big applications - in other words, it's build on a pretty
weak fundament.
I think AIR/Flex has a great potential to develop into areas
beyond my imagination, though I hope that Adobe will be very
carefull in what they do to avoid spending time on areas that is
better suited for other environments.
So for the time beeing I see AIR/Flex as an AJAX killer,
though it would be very critical if you marketed the framework as
such. Many of the potential developers are still very pleased with
their AJAX skills and applications, and they probably don't like
the idea of killing those (yet). This is also why Adobe tries (very
hard) to bridge the gap between Flex and AJAX - though in reality
it would probably be easier to just trash the AJAX parts.
Adobe created printers with their PostScript engines, and all
we need now are monitors and TV sets with AIR/Flex engines -
imagine the posibilities then ;-)