What's the advantage of an Adobe AIR app over a traditional desktop app?

Posted by John on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by John
Published on 2010-06-03T10:31:01Z Indexed on 2010/06/03 11:04 UTC
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Filed under:

flex

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air

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cross-platform

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desktop-application

I'm pretty familiar with using Adobe Flex & AS3, and compared with writing apps in JS/HTML I think it's very cool. However, since AIR is essentially a non-browser version of Flex with benefits like local storage, it seems to be competing as a cross-platform desktop application platform... and in that space it's much less mature than more established desktop technologies.

So what's the advantage of creating a desktop application using AIR compared to something like Java (or C++ using a cross-platform GUI library like wxWidgets)? Java's equally capable of communicating with the server for instance, I'm not quite sure what AIR adds when competing head-to-head in the desktop development world?

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