Building Adobe AIR Applications

BUILDING ADOBE AIR APPLICATIONS
Creating your first AIR application
Install the application on a desktop
Now that you’ve created the application file, you can install it on any desktop.
1 Move the Adobe AIR application file out of your Dreamweaver site and onto your desktop, or to another desktop.
This step is optional. You can actually install the new application on your computer right from your Dreamweaver
site directory if you prefer.
2 Double-click the application executable file (.air file) to install the application.
Preview the Adobe AIR application
You can preview pages that will be part of AIR applications at any time. That is, you don’t necessarily need to package
the application before seeing what it will look like when it’s installed.
1 Make sure your hello_world.html page is open in the Dreamweaver Document window.
2 On the Document toolbar, click the Preview/Debug in Browser button, and then select Preview In AIR.
You can also press Ctrl+Shift+F12 (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+F12 (Macintosh).
When you preview this page, you are essentially seeing what a user would see as the start page of the application
after they’ve installed the application on a desktop.
Creating your first HTML-based AIR application with the
AIR SDK
For a quick, hands-on illustration of how Adobe® AIR® works, use these instructions to create and package a simple
HTML-based AIR “Hello World” application.
To begin, you must have installed the runtime and set up the AIR SDK. You will use the AIR Debug Launcher (ADL)
and the AIR Developer Tool (ADT) in this tutorial. ADL and ADT are command-line utility programs and can be
found in the bin directory of the AIR SDK (see “Installing the AIR SDK” on page 16). This tutorial assumes that you
are already familiar with running programs from the command line and know how to set up the necessary path
environment variables for your operating system.
Note: If you are an Adobe® Dreamweaver® user, read “Create your first HTML-based AIR application with
Dreamweaver” on page 29.
Note: HTML-based AIR applications can only be developed for the desktop and the extendedDesktop profiles. The mobile
profile is not supported.
Create the project files
Every HTML-based AIR project must contain the following two files: an application descriptor file, which specifies the
application metadata, and a top-level HTML page. In addition to these required files, this project includes a JavaScript
code file, AIRAliases.js, that defines convenient alias variables for the AIR API classes.
1 Create a directory named HelloWorld to contain the project files.
2 Create an XML file, named HelloWorld-app.xml.
3 Create an HTML file named HelloWorld.html.
4 Copy AIRAliases.js from the frameworks folder of the AIR SDK to the project directory.
Last updated 7/8/2013
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