Adobe's AIR is RIA-lly good

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 11 June 2007 16:19

Opinion and Analysis

Companies such as Thinkfree have indeed offered offline versions of their Office suite using Java for some time now, giving their users the best of both worlds, but finally, Microsoft with Silverlight, Google with Gears and Abobe with AIR have finally caught up and are now making online/offline applications fully mainstream, and bringing them to the attention of hundreds of millions more people.

AIR could also help to create a new range of ‘presentation programs’ that are encapsulated advertisements replete with whatever data their creator wants to insert within, links to information online, inbuilt catalogs and ecommerce engines.

And while no-one seems to have said much about it, how soon will it be before someone figures out how to create some kind of malicious program using AIR, despite Adobe’s best efforts to create as secure an environment as possible?

Still, that said, Adobe’s AIR is an excellent development environment that sees software take on a whole new level of portability and usefulness for the end user. Security and privacy are no strangers to controversy in the modern world – there can be no doubt that Adobe has taken these issues seriously.

Adobe, Google and Microsoft now have a huge battle on their hands for dominance in this space. Just as with battles of the past, from office suites to browsers to operating systems and more, companies are battling it out to win you – the user.

We’re leaving a world of Web 2.0 apps and entering a world of Web 2-point-You!