I may be assigned an Android project, and have minimal experience with Java but a lot of experience with Flash Builder. Does anyone have an opinion on Adobe AIR for Android, which lets you "publish ActionScript projects to run as native applications for the Android OS"? I'm generally wary of cross-compilers, but don't have a desire to learn Java either...
+2
A:
AIR isn't a cross-compiler really - your application gets published as an APK, which you can put on the Android market or whatever, but somewhere inside that APK is a SWF that gets executed by the Android version of the AIR runtime. When they say "native application", they mean that the user interacts with it the same way they interact with native apps, but the content itself is a cross-platform binary, just like desktop AIR (or Java for that matter). The process is entirely parallel to AIR on desktops, except that the deployed file is named .apk instead of .air.
In any case there's no need to speculate, as the runtime itself and the tools to create apps are currently in open beta. (Well, semi-open - the binaries are inside a prerelease program but everyone gets accepted automatically.) All I've done so far is to republish some content I had previously made for other platforms as AIR apps, but it's worked very smoothly so far.
The pros and cons are basically the same as the pros and cons of using AIR on any other platform, so if AIR in general would be a good choice for you, Android/AIR is probably worth your time to look into.
fenomas
2010-08-27 03:25:13
Forgot to mention: AIR/Android is not released yet (I think the schedule is "this year"), and the runtime requires Android 2.2. If either of those is a breaker for you you may need a different technology. (Though I imagine 2.2 will be on most phones by the time AIR releases, or soon after..)
fenomas
2010-08-27 05:45:08
@fenomas - Thanks- Do you know if Android require separate download for AIR runtime, or is it already installed? And does the Beta status make it impossible to currently publish an app, or must it be done with a 'beta' caveat.
Yarin
2010-08-27 16:26:35
I guess any phone could preinstall the runtime if they wanted but most people will probably get it off the market. I think that the Android market knows how to consider the runtime a required libraries, so if someone without the runtime tries to install an AIR app, the market will send them the runtime as well. As for releasing apps, I'm not sure about the legal side, but right now the runtime is only available in the beta, so only people in the beta could run what you release.
fenomas
2010-08-29 05:09:52