8 | Chapter 1: Introduction to the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
• XHTML
- Document Object Model (DOM)
Yes, you read that right. You don’t have to use Flash to build
Adobe AIR applications. You can build full-featured applica-
tions using just HTML and JavaScript. This usually surprises
some developers who expect Adobe AIR to focus only on
Flash. However, at its core, Adobe AIR is a runtime targeted
at web developers using web technologies—and what’s more
of a web technology than HTML and JavaScript?
The HTML engine used within Adobe AIR is the open source
WebKit engine. This is the engine behind a number of brows-
ers, including KHTML on KDE and Safari on Mac OS X.
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You can find more information on the WebKit open
source project athttp://www.webkit.org.
See Chapter 3, “Working with JavaScript and HTML
within Adobe AIR”, for a more in-depth discussion of
WebKit within Adobe AIR.Flash
The second core application technology that Adobe AIR is
built on is the Flash Player. Specifically, Adobe AIR is built
on top of Flash Player 9, which includes the ECMAScript-
based ActionScript 3, as well as the open source Tamarin vir-
tual machine (which will be used to interpret JavaScript in
future versions of Firefox).
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You can find more information on the open source Tama-
rin project at on the Mozilla web site athttp://www.
mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/.