Adobe AIR set to take flight at Nasdaq, charity

"You don't have to be a C++ programmer to build a desktop application any more," noted Mike Downey, Adobe's group manager for evangelism in its platform unit. "[Using AIR] should be a fairly transparent experience for anyone already doing AJAX development."

That was a big selling point for Adam Pellegrini, strategic director of online at the American Cancer Society, who called on his staff to prepare to use AIR immediately after Adobe announced the public alpha release early last year. The organization built its first AIR application almost immediately, he noted.

"[AIR] reduces one step from the design process, which completely accelerates your product life cycle," Pellegrini said. "If you have a Flash programmer on staff, they can hit the ground on Day One and create an application."

Since the Atlanta-based charity began working with a beta version of the technology last spring, developers have also created an application that integrates Google Maps with some desktop Web services, allowing users to find the location of cancer treatment resources by entering a ZIP code.

Another new Cancer Society application allows users to enter demographic information and receive suggestions about scheduling tests such as a mammogram, he said. The group hopes that providing such reminders on desktop systems will be more effective in prompting users about their treatment needs than forcing them to frequently visit a Web site, Pellegrini added.

In addition, the group is using Flex to create a AIR-based portal that will allow physicians to access the Cancer Society's information over the Web and then use the data offline, he said.

Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research, predicted that AIR will capture the interest of many organizations, especially those running aging client/server applications built using fourth-generation languages or Microsoft's Visual Basic tool set. AIR can be used to re-create such software as Web-desktop applications, he added.

"In those sorts of situations, AIR is a very nice fit, to take what is working today and [updating] it," Hammond said. "There are a lot of aging applications out there that have a richer user experience than what traditional Web applications have had up to this point."

Hammond also predicted that the browser will likely continue to be the preferred application-delivery vehicle at some sites because of AIR's dependence on Adobe's Flash Player. He also noted that other sites may not give users permission to use AIR in some cases because it could pose some security problems. "This stuff really hasn't been tried before," he said.

"Developers might think they are doing validation on the client so they won't have to do validation on the server, but you have to do it in both places," Hammond said. "You do it on the server because you assume any client is untrustworthy."

Paul Giurata, managing partner of Catalyst Resources, a services firm, said that most of his clients are moving away from the desktop altogether in favor of hosted systems. Catalyst Resources builds user interfaces and AJAX applications for its customers.

"The trend we have seen is almost all people developing new software applications are moving toward the software-as-a-service model," he said. "Over 80% of [our clients] have said they don't want to have to distribute software."

But some companies using hosted development offerings could use AIR nevertheless. For example, Coghead , a provider of hosted development tools in Redwood City, California, announced this month that it had rebuilt its technology in Flex, Adobe's AJAX development tool set, in part to prepare itself to embrace AIR.