Kevin Hoyt

JavaScript is loosely-typed. Duh. If you’re developing JavaScript using Aptana however, the intelligence about your code makes it seem like strongly-typed bliss. It instantly picks up every little variable and function, and it knows all about the JavaScript libraries you include. Last night Aptana dropped a new update that now also knows all about Adobe Spry. Not to be outdone by themselves, this afternoon they also dropped an update to their AIR plug-in. Here’s a quick walk through of some of what’s new in Aptana as it relates to Adobe technologies.
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You may not have known this, but it was completely possible to author an AIR application with the “Apollo Alpha” using only your favorite HTML editor. No Flash and no Flex required; just you and your HTML. This continues to be the case with the AIR Beta, which improves integration and offers more features. Hot off the presses, the “AIR Pocket Guide for JavaScript Developers” aims to accelerate your success in getting started with this workflow.
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There is a fantastically interesting conversation happening on the “Apollo Coders” Yahoo! Group. The original message comes in from Jeff Houser of The Flex Show fame, and is about wanting to build an AIR application for a client. The requirements however, and the responses from the list, pretty quickly nail this as distinctly not an AIR application. I couldn’t help but wonder however, what functional changes to the requirements would make this an AIR application?
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Among the early AIR (then Apollo) applications was MapSnap, which is developed and maintained by Christian Cantrell. MapSnap eventually became MapCache with the launch of Adobe AIR. MapCache is developed using Flex, and demonstrates local file IO, clipboard access and native drag and drop using PNG-encoded map images. Given that Yahoo! Maps offers a great API for the JavaScript developer, I decided to port this application over to HTML/CSS/JavaScript.
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I got an email earlier this week that pointed to David Cann’s iPhone interface done in JavaScript. I hadn’t seen it before, and I don’t know how long it has been around, but I thought it was pretty slick. Inspired by the possibilities, I decided to take the lead on moving into an AIR application. We always say that HTML applications are first-class citizens on AIR, but I’ve never really tried it with anyone else’s code but my own. Here was the chance to eat our own dog food, and see just how far we’ve come. How are we doing? Read on!
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By now you’ve heard that Adobe has launched the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly Apollo. You probably heard about Flex 3, too. If you’re an HTML developer however, there are a few announcements that may have gotten past you. HTML/CSS/JS is a first-class citizen for developing AIR applications, and to that end there’s a some new developments that assist in that workflow. There’s also some updates and a new addition to the HTML-based sample applications.
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Depending on the dominant browser for your web application, and the security settings therein, you may have been able to work with text on the system clipboard via JavaScript. If you’re a Flash developer, the Flash Player allows you to send text to the clipboard, but not to get anything at all from it. This leaves you branching out to JavaScript, checking the browser and settings, and then potentially being able to work only with text. Historically, this has been painful for all parties involved, but this is about to change! The Apollo Beta will introduce system clipboard support for text, bitmap data, and even lists of files.
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Native windowing is an Apollo feature I personally find very exciting because it makes Apollo more than just a way to offer offline web applications. Native windows and custom chrome won’t be new in the Apollo Beta for Flash developers, but it will be new for HTML developers! While JavaScript can spawn new browser windows today, those windows still fundamentally belong to the browser. With Apollo, those windows belong to your application and you can control the size, position, z-index, transparency and much more. It’s that last one, transparency, that even enables custom chrome.
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Well, since the news about Apollo using SQLite as a local database has been released, I thought I’d go ahead and spill a few more beans. This may even become a trend, as it’s really hard keeping all these cool secrets. I thought I’d start with a little example that I really thought was exciting - support for system icons. Not being enough to simply stop there, this example will also save the images of the icons to the local disk as PNG files. Oh, and did I mention that this will be entirely HTML/JavaScript? Let’s get started!
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