Building an Adobe AIR app from scratch

I can talk all day about Adobe AIR capabilities and architecture, but in order for you to really understand how to develop apps, nothing works better than walking through each step of the development process. In the experience of many developers, it is only when they build their first Hello World app that those precious words “Ahhhhh, I get it” are uttered.

Developers, quite obviously, do not become instant experts after creating one simple application. But that first app does provide a context and a foun- dation for understanding the programming and procedural landscape of the platform on which they are working.

In that light, this chapter is intended as the Ahhhhh, I get it chapter. I show the steps you need to take to build and deploy a basic Adobe AIR application using HTML and JavaScript.

Overviewing Jot

The application I walk you through in this chapter is one I call Jot. Jot has one limited purpose — to allow a user to enter text in a box and save the text to a file on the desktop. I spice things up a bit by adding my own custom “chrome” user interface. You can follow along with my code to build a dupli- cate version or download the entire source code at www.dummies.com.

To help you build Jot, I walk you through a series of eight steps, as follows:
1. Prepare the application folder.
2. Create the HTML-based UI.
3. Define CSS styles.
4. Add the JavaScript code.
5. Create the application descriptor file.
6. Create a self-signed certificate.
7. Compile the application.
8. Take a test drive.

The remaining sections of this chapter present the details of each of these steps.

Preparing the Application Folder

Your first step in creating Jot is simply to prepare a folder on your hard drive that will serve as the root for the application files. To prepare that folder, follow these three steps:
1. On your hard drive, create a new folder named jot. This folder will serve as the root folder containing all the application files.
2. Inside the new jot folder, create two subdirectories: assets and icons. The assets folder will store your .js and .css styles. The icons folder will contain the application icons.
3. Copy the AIRAliases.js file into the assets folder. The AIRAliases.js file is located inside the SDK frameworks folder.

With your application folder ready to go, it’s time to begin creating the application itself.

Source: Adobe AIR for Dummies

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