9.5. Summary

You now have successfully broken free of the browser and created an application that power users can use standalone. Even though it took a lot of configuration, you’ll notice that you never had to change much of the application code to get this to work. There are not many programming languages or frameworks that will allow you to so easily reuse the code to create both a web-based client and a desktop client. This is one of the attractive features of both the Flex framework and the Adobe AIR framework. You’ll discover that many of the Flex applications can be translated into AIR applications with minimal effort.

The Adobe AIR SDK offers much more functionality than you can accomplish with the Flex framework alone, so if you’re going to create an AIR application, don’t limit yourself to the Flex components and APIs. The AIR application framework offers you the ability to store information in an embedded database so that you could potentially create an offline capable version of the application that could sync up the local database with the master database when the network becomes available again.