~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc.

As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC).

edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!

No, it's definitely correct, they definitely supported HTML/CSS/JS at some point, not flash-only content - I myself published a normal SPA back in ~2010, and looking back it's actually kind of insane how similar Adobe AIR is to Electron.

Ohhh, I think one of the OS-integration features was that you could invoke an instance of the OS's web component, is that what you mean? AIR itself didn't do anything with html/js but you could render web content at runtime via the OS component.

Just looked back at some docs now, thanks. The things you forget in ten years..

Yeah, same! I didn't remember that it had been a wrapper (to be honest I have very little memory of -how- we did it), but I suppose it makes sense. TweetDeck was Adobe AIR too at the time, no?

Yeah, I'm almost sure there was no html renderer or JS engine in AIR, but you could have pure html apps with no flash in the source now that I think back. TweetDeck was I'm sure, and one other high-profile AIR desktop app was the launcher/lobby app for League of Legends.

Your parent comment is correct. I did develop small AIR desktop apps some years ago with html+js, not flash, and I did switch to electron/nwjs later.

As the Wikipedia page I linked points out:

"HTML5 applications may run on the WebKit engine included in AIR."

But still a security nightmare yeah, though with less "remote compromise" possibility?

>AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash.

When I was working with AIR it also had Flex4 , a GUI component library that you could use to create advanced and efficient GUIs for application. Compared to that in JS world you still need to create your stuff by nesting divs (in AIR you had customization, efficient and advaced Dropdowns, lsit views, DataGrids, Tabs).

When I mean efficient I mean I could have a DaraGrid with 1 million rows not like all HTML Tech where you get pagination with 20 rows per page or some infinite scrolling that is slow to load when scrolling and you can't do instant searches and filtering on.

ActionScript 3 the language is a typed EcmaScript like language, like a better TypeScript sicne types were actually used to improve performance.