Web Directions North » Blog Archive » Developing with Adobe AIR and Microsoft Silverlight

Andre Charland, the CEO of Vancouver-based Nitobi, was on hand at Web Directions 08 to give attendees a crash course in Adobe AIR development. AIR, put simply, lets web developers build desktop apps. Essentially AIR allows web development to be taken offline, and removes the restrictions that a browser interface imposes on developers. It features file I/O, native windowing and menuing, and can also tell if a user is online or offline. AIR also allows HTML content in Flash, can make calls to Actionscript right from Javascrpt, as well as closely integrating with PDF documents.

Air is a run-time, not a plugin, and is available now for Windows and the Macintosh, with Linux support coming soon. The program is free, as is the SDK.

Walter Smith of Jackson Fish Market gave an overview of Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash challenger.

Silverlight’s origins are in the Windows Presentation Framework, but unlike WPF, Silverlight is small, works on Windows and the Mac, and is a browser plugin. WPF is part of the .NET framework and doesn’t integrate well with web technologies.

But what Silverlight does take from the WPF is an object model, markup in XAML and a runtime model. Version 2. will have controls, layout managers, data binding, support for dynamic languages, and the option of using the .NET framework. Silverlight also allows media streaming and naturally has Windows media support right out of the box.

Posted by Warren on 30/01/08 at 4:42 pm