To develop HTML-based Adobe® AIR™ applications, you can use the Adobe®AIR™ Extension for Dreamweaver, the AIR SDK command-line tools, or other Web development tools that support Adobe AIR. This topic explains how to install the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver and the AIR SDK.

Contents

• Installing the AIR Extension for Dreamweaver
• Installing the AIR SDK

Installing the AIR Extension for Dreamweaver

The AIR Extension for Dreamweaver helps you to create rich Internet applications for the desktop. For example, you might have a set of web pages that interact with each other to display XML data. You can use the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver to package this set of pages into a small application that can be installed on a user's computer. When the user runs the application from their desktop, the application loads and displays the website in its own application window, independent of a browser. The user can then browse the website locally on their computer without an Internet connection.

Dynamic pages such as Adobe® ColdFusion® and PHP pages won't run in Adobe AIR. The runtime only works with HTML and JavaScript. However, you can use JavaScript in your pages to call any web service exposed on the Internet--including ColdFusion- or PHP-generated services--with Ajax methods such as XMLHTTPRequest or Adobe AIR-specific APIs.

For more information about the types of applications you can develop with Adobe AIR, see Introducing Adobe AIR.

System requirements

To use the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver, the following software must be installed and properly configured:

• Dreamweaver CS3 (Windows XP or Vista, or Mac OS X 10.4 with Intel or PowerPC processor)
• Adobe® Extension Manager CS3
• Java JRE 1.4 or later (necessary for creating the Adobe AIR file). The Java JRE is available at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html.

The preceding requirements are only for creating and previewing Adobe AIR applications in Dreamweaver. To install and run an Adobe AIR application on the desktop, you must also install Adobe AIR on your computer. To download the runtime, see www.adobe.com/go/air.

Install the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver

1. Download the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver.
2. Double-click the .mxp extension file in Windows Explorer (Windows) or in the Finder (Macintosh).
3. Follow the onscreen instructions to install the extension.
4. After you're finished, restart Dreamweaver.

For information about using the Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver, see Using the AIR Extension for Dreamweaver.

Installing the AIR SDK

The Adobe AIR SDK contains the following command-line tools that you use to launch and package applications:

AIR Debug Launcher (ADL)  

Allows you to run AIR applications without having to first install them. See Using the AIR Debug Launcher (ADL).

AIR Development Tool (ADT) 

Packages AIR applications into distributable installation packages. See Packaging an AIR installation file using the AIR Developer Tool (ADT).

The AIR command-line tools require Java to be installed your computer. You can use the Java virtual machine from either the JRE or the JDK (version 1.4.2 or newer). The Java JRE is available at http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/download.html. The Java JDK is available at http://java.sun.com/javase/downloads/index.jsp.

Download and install the AIR SDK

You can download and install the AIR SDK using the following instructions:

Install the AIR SDK in Windows

1. Download the AIR SDK installation file.
2. The AIR SDK is distributed as a standard file archive. To install AIR, extract the contents of the SDK to a folder on your computer (for example: C:\Program Files\Adobe\AIRSDK or C:\AIRSDK).
3. The ADL and ADT tools are contained in the bin folder in the AIR SDK; add the path to this folder to your PATH environment variable.

Install the AIR SDK in Mac OS X

1. Download the AIR SDK installation file.
2. The AIR SDK is distributed as a standard file archive. To install AIR, extract the contents of the SDK to a folder on your computer (for example: /Users/<userName>/Applications/AIRSDK).
3. The ADL and ADT tools are contained in the bin folder in the AIR SDK; add the path to this folder to your PATH environment variable.

For information about getting started using the AIR SDK tools, see Creating an AIR application using the command line tools.

What's included in the AIR SDK

The following table describes the purpose of the files contained in the AIR SDK: