Putting an AIR UI on a C++ application

Question

Hello everyone. I work for a very large and well known
company in the entertainment software industry ($4B revenues last
year). We currently have a C++ based desktop application for which
we are currently using Adobe Flex as a UI layer (this was built
before AIR was available). Since Flex wasn't really designed to be
used in desktop applications, we've had to do some pretty strange
stuff involving embedded web browsers to make it work... To be
kind, it's rather hacky.
Now that AIR is available, it seems to offer us a way to
significantly simplify our application structure. We'd keep the C++
core application (we do lots of multithreaded stuff), and then use
AIR applications to display interfaces to the end-user, using
socket(s) as the communication bridge between the C++ and AIR apps.
However, I've run up against a potential sticking point. All
of the AIR apps I've used so far use the traditional AIR installer
and install like a normal application. This process wouldn't really
be appropriate for the type of applications we would be developing.
Rather, we'd like to skip the install process altogether and have
the AIR applications invoked directly by the C++ core application
on an as needed basis. Similar to how you can just run a .swf
directly in flash player, or even an AIR app in the ADL without
having to do a big install song and dance first. Or seemingly
similar to what Shu or AveerAir can do (though I have questions as
to whether those are legal -- since I'm part of a large
corporation, everything we do has to be strictly on the level).
Is this possible, or can anybody give me any ideas as to how
this might be done? Do all Air apps have to go through the
formalized AIR installer before they can be executed on the end
user's machine? Or is there some other mechanism we can leverage to
avoid the application installation mechanism?
Many thanks,
Alex

Answer 1

The supported way to do this kind of thing is to embed the
installation of your AIR application in your own installer. To do
this, you first sign up to redistribute AIR. Once that's done,
you'll have access to instructions on how to make it work. (It's
straightfoward.)
See
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/runtime_distribution1.html.