viii | Preface
What This Book Covers
This book gives a general overview of Adobe AIR, shows
how to set up your development environment to start build-
ing applications, provides an overview of the HTML and
JavaScript engines within AIR, and shows how to perform a
number of common programming tasks within AIR.
As a general rule, features and functionality already in the
Beta build are relatively stable and should not change radi-
cally (although they may be tweaked based on developer
feedback). Any details discussed around unimplemented fea-
tures and functionality are much more tentative and may
change in future builds.
Table P-1. AIR runtime naming conventions
Name Meaning
Adobe Integrated
Runtime (AIR)The cross-platform desktop runtime that enables the running
of AIR applications.
AIR Application An application built with Flash, HTML and/or PDF that runs on
top of Adobe AIR.
Flash Any content contained within a SWF 9 file format that runs in
the Flash Player or AIR.
ActionScript The ECMAScript-based programming language used to
program Flash content. Unless otherwise noted, all references
to ActionScript in this book refer to ActionScript 3.
HTML Standard web-based markup language used to create and
layout web pages.
JavaScript Web-based implementation of ECMAScript used to program
content within HTML applications.
PDF Short for Portable Document Format, a technology that
allows for seamless distribution and display of electronic
documents.
Flex Framework An XML and ActionScript-based Framework designed to make
developing Flash-based rich Internet applications easy.
Flex Builder An Eclipse-based IDE used to build Flash-based rich Internet
applications using Flex and ActionScript.