Chapter 6. Interacting with the File System

For web developers, the end user’s file system has always been off limits; however, desktop application developers have been able to work with the local file system for years. In fact, file system access is the foundation of many desktop applications, allowing for interactions such as reading and writing of property files and saving application state, to storing and accessing the actual data for the application.

AIR provides a set of synchronous and asynchronous APIs that facilitate interacting with the file system on a user’s local machine. While it may seem daunting if you haven’t done it before, reading a local file isn’t much different than pulling a file from a remote server.