Alain Hufkens
Can Merapi help us get more interesting Adobe AIR projects in the future? Well I hope so, but first I have to get approved by the team to play around with the current Alpa version. I registered on their website after reading the articles RFID Enabled AIR Applications With Merapi and Live GPS Visualizations With AIR & Merapiand. This looks very promising indeed.
At my company we get a lot of requests to build an Adobe AIR application for a client, but the client has no clue what Adobe AIR can do and especially what it can’t do. This means that we get requests for applications to interact with other applications and/or communicating with external hardware. You can think of workarounds or tell the client that Adobe AIR is not right technology to solve their problem. But using the Flash/Flex framework can be powerful if you want to build a “Filthy Rich Client”. Using Java also means that the end solution you are building will remain platform independent.
But it also means that you are breaking the security sandbox and your application will have more power over the user’s system. The installation experience of the Java/AIR application might also become more complex then the smooth installation of AIR applications.
Well it’s an interesting product and I hope to play with it very soon.
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