Adobe AIR Building Apps

BUILDING ADOBE AIR APPLICATIONS
Creating your first AIR application
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Test the application
To run and test the application from the command line, use the AIR Debug Launcher (ADL) to launch the application
using its application descriptor file. (ADL can be found in the bin directory of the Flex SDK.)
❖ From the command prompt, enter the following command:
adl HelloWorld-app.xml
The resulting AIR application looks something like this illustration:
Using the horizontalCenter and verticalCenter properties of the Label control, the text is placed in the center of the
window. Move or resize the window as you would any other desktop application.
For more information, see “AIR Debug Launcher (ADL)” on page 152.
Create the AIR installation file
When your application runs successfully, you can use the ADT utility to package the application into an AIR
installation file. An AIR installation file is an archive file that contains all the application files, which you can distribute
to your users. You must install Adobe AIR before installing a packaged AIR file.
To ensure application security, all AIR installation files must be digitally signed. For development purposes, you can
generate a basic, self-signed certificate with ADT or another certificate generation tool. You can also buy a commercial
code-signing certificate from a commercial certification authority. When users install a self-signed AIR file, the
publisher is displayed as “unknown” during the installation process. This is because a self-signed certificate only
guarantees that the AIR file has not been changed since it was created. There is nothing to prevent someone from selfsigning
a masquerade AIR file and presenting it as your application. For publicly released AIR files, a verifiable,
commercial certificate is strongly recommended. For an overview of AIR security issues, see AIR security (for
ActionScript developers) or AIR security (for HTML developers).
Generate a self-signed certificate and key pair
❖ From the command prompt, enter the following command (the ADT executable can be found in the bin directory
of the Flex SDK):
adt -certificate -cn SelfSigned 1024-RSA sampleCert.pfx samplePassword
This example uses the minimum number of attributes that can be set for a certificate. The key type must be either
1024-RSA or 2048-RSA (see “Signing AIR applications” on page 181).
Create the AIR package
❖ From the command prompt, enter the following command (on a single line):
Last updated 2/22/2016