server side Adobe AIR apps

Question

This might sound like a really stupid question, but is there anyway to run an Adobe AIR application in a headless server side mode on a non-UI server (i.e. Linux)? I'm trying to build server side bots to interact with an API (grapevinetalk.com) and I want to use existing code to do that without having to re-write all the data munging etc for a new application.

The application I'm trying to port is essentially a jQuery based AIR desktop app that I want to reuse for server side interactions. I've tried Rhino with envjs.com, but am having some issues so am looking at alternatives.

Thanks

Robbie

Answer 1

AIR applications can be headless in the sense that they can run without UIs, and start on boot and so on. I'm not 100% sure that they can be installed without a UI though, though that may not be a problem if it's possible to temporarily get a server UI with a remote desktop of whatever variety.

But you should be aware that this isn't really a supported use case for AIR right now. I recall seeing an issue (can't find the link any more) where someone had written a server-like AIR app that worked fine for a while and then stopped responding, and when they remoted onto the server the found that the runtime had popped up an update dialog and it was waiting for input. I believe there's currently no way to avoid this kind of thing.