Getting Started with Adobe AIR

It seems I'm always late to a good party. Yesterday, I finally did something I've been meaning to do for, oh, at least two years: I compiled and ran my first Adobe AIR application. And in typical masochistic fashion, I decided to do it with Notepad as my code editor and command-line tools for compilation. It's not that I can't afford Dreamweaver or Flash Builder, mind you (I have both products and recommend them highly); it was more a matter of wanting to get dirt under my fingernails, so to speak. That's just how I am.

The whole process of downloading the AIR SDK, reading online code examples, and getting my first example up and running took a little less than an hour from start to finish. There were only a couple of rough spots (both easily resolved). The first was creating my own self-signed security certificate. I did this with the ADT tool that comes with the AIR SDK. The magic command-line incantation that worked for me was:

adt -certificate -cn SelfSign -ou KT -o "Kas Thomas" -c US 2048-RSA cert.p12 password1234

Naturally, you'll want to change some of the parameters (e.g., the ones with my name and initials, and the password) when you do this yourself. But running this command should produce a certificate named cert.p12 on your local drive, assuming adt.bat (Windows) is in your path.

For example code, I turned to the text editor example described here. I compiled the code with:

..\bin\adt -package -storetype pkcs12 -keystore ..\cert.p12 TextEditorHTML.air application.xml .

(running a command console from a location of C:\AIR\TextEditorHTML, with my certificate stored under C:\AIR). The first time I did this, I got an error of "File C:\AIR\TextEditorHTML\application.xml is not a valid AIRI or AIR file." If you get the "is not a valid AIRI or AIR file" error, it means you left the trailing period off the foregoing command line. (Note carefully the period after "application.xml" at the very end.)

And that was basically it. My first AIR app: done in under an hour. Now, as Shantanu Narayen says, "let the games begin!"