Adobe AIR 1.5 is a major upgrade to a serious platform.

It turned out that on Habré there is nothing about Adobe AIR 1.5 , so I decided to fill the gap. And so, what's new and interesting in this version, we'll talk further.

The very first I would note that the very insides of the platform were updated. If anyone does not know, by and large, the two main components of the AIR platform are the Flash engine and the HTML / JavaScript rendering engine of WebKit. Exactly they were updated. After all, a new version of Flash-plug-in version 10 was released the other day, in which there are also a lot of changes and innovations. If earlier beta could be used in browsers, then the AIR platform used an outdated version of the Flash player, but now the versions are equal and all the features of the 10th version of Flash are available for use.

WebKit's web page rendering engine is used in a number of other products, including the flagship browser on MacOS - Safari, and in many tests is considered the most advanced engine, a direct competitor to Gecko and Chromium. One of the most important parts of the browser engine today is the JavaScript interpreter (virtual machine), since AJAX is a lot of scripts. And already in the platform for web applications, this component is the most important. The WebKit project has long been developing an innovative (and fast, as tests say) SquirrelFish engine , which was previously present only in experimental builds, and now, finally, we have at our disposal the most powerful tool on our favorite platform - the latest version of WebKit is built into AIR 1.5 -and with the SquirrelFish engine enabled by default. It remains only to find out in real applications whether the execution of real applications has become faster. At least - it did not become slower. True, until I fully understood the situation with another project, Tamarin , which is designed to combine Flash and JavaScript virtual machines, the code of which is transmitted to Gecko, however, why Adobe did not use its own virtual machines is not yet clear, although Apparently, there are objective reasons for this, because the project has not yet reached the state of release. Another question that has not yet been resolved is that there is a separate branch called SquirrelFish Extreme , whether this version is used in AIR or not. It is stated that in this version the speed is even more optimized, various caching options are added, etc. Perhaps we should expect in the next version of AIR-a new update of the key components of the platform.

The AIR platform also has a local data warehouse, an embedded SQLite database. There is a similarity with a slightly similar product, Google Gears , in which one of the components is SQLite-based storage. And in version 1.5 of the platform, we received an extension of functionality aimed at facilitating the creation of protected applications and ensuring the overall security of the platform. Now the application can create a secure encrypted storage (Encrypted Local Store, ELS), data from which is accessible only by password and which are stored in encrypted form using the AES-CBC algorithm. By the way, the protected bases are individual for each application and user in the system, and for differentiation of rights, the native tools for each platform are used - DPAPI in Windows, KeyChain in Mac OS or KeyRing / KWallet on Linux. Although the storage can be of unlimited size, the documentation honestly warns that a significant decrease in speed is possible, especially if you have a secure database of 10 MB or more.
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In the announcements it was especially emphasized that the technology of Adobe Pixel Bender is now available on the AIR platform. In short, this is the ability to program effects for video that is played by a flash player. In this case, the effects are described in an XML-like language, and the effects themselves and their implementation are hardware-independent and optimized for multi-core systems (for example, execution on a GPU or CPU).

That's all the news, in short, the new Flash, respectively, new graphics and sound processing capabilities, an updated HTML rendering engine and a JavaScript interpreter. All together, this promises to accelerate applications, although it is difficult to talk about real numbers, but if you believe the announcements, then up to 35% (apparently, it means that the new JS code execution engine shows a similar increase in tests).

According to the latest announcements, the development tools have also been updated, for example, Aptana IDE showed a new version, 1.2.1, which is still in development, but already supports debugging JavaScript code on the AIR platform (such as the first such environment, I'm not sure about Flex Builder) , but it is paid). But this will be the next article.

Ps . By the way, it is interesting - if you download the SDK last for AIR, and look into the directory structure, then inside the runtimes directory we will find the Versions subdirectory and the 1.0 directory there, although the platform versions are still 1.5, do not worry.