Build your first Adobe AIR application with Aptana

Filed under: Developer, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Adobe, Open Source

Build your first Adobe AIR application with Aptana

by Ian Smith Jul 2nd 2007

Recently Aptana added support for Adobe AIR (the platform formally known as Apollo) to their Open Source IDE. Why is this cool? Well Aptana is a standalone web/JavaScript development application that is built on top of Eclipse. Best of all, Aptana is free. This is a great alternative to locking yourself into Adobe's Dreamweaver or Flex builder plugins.

You can download Aptana here. Once you have it installed, open it up and look at the Aptana start page under Plugins. Here you will be able to walk through the process of downloading and installing the Adobe Air Runtime, SDK, and the Aptana Plugin.

Once everything is setup simply go to File > New > Project and select Adobe Air. Fill in the project name and description and then import your preferred Ajax Libraries to start coding with. There is a host to libraries to choose from including YUI, jQuery, and ProtoType.

The pre-created project includes all of the Javascript needed to start writing your application. The AIRAliases.js file maps all of the local OS and file system functions to JavaScript so that you can, within AIR, make calls directly to the users computer. I recommend trying out the sample text-file editor application from the Adobe's QuickStart page to get a sense of how easy it is to build AIR applications and what is possible using this new framework.

Once you have your code ready to test, just hit the green "Play" button and Aptana will compile your app and launch it within Adobe AIR

Tags: adobe air, AdobeAir, apollo, aptana, ide, javascript

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

kingkool68 said 4:55PM on 7-02-2007

You can also develop for the iPhone too -> http://www.aptana.com/iphone/

Aptana is starting to look real hot!!!

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