At Black Pepper Software we primarily deal with Java on the server side and then various kinds of front ends, but it's usually browser based. With the release of an almost feature complete Adobe AIR runtime for Linux (to catch up with Windows and OS X), I felt it was time to experiment a bit more with what a modern desktop app was like.

Trying out AIR was a natural step for me as I've been spending a lot of time doing Flex recently, but I've never done desktop development before. This is partly because in this day and age it is so easy to keep your web app up to date without the deployment costs and versioning problems you get with desktop software. What happens when you have a desktop app that is connecting to some web services and you want to change those services? You've got to update your desktop app and make sure that your users get that update, otherwise things will break.

AIR doesn't come with an update framework built in, but there is one in Adobe Labs at the moment which works a treat called the Adobe AIR Update Framework. I will point out up front though that the Update Framework is NOT open source, in fact, no source is provided at all except for the samples of how to use it.

Giving users the option to have your application remember their login details is a simple and really useful feature for any desktop app to offer. Web browsers have had this feature for a long time now and you can even store your usernames for your Flex web app in a SharedObject...but when storing passwords, you have to be quite careful with how you store the data.

Thankfully EncryptedLocalStore comes to the rescue in AIR, but it's not available in the browser.

My test app for this is a simple two screen Cairngorm AIR app. I'll skip over some of the boilerplate of the app and just get down to the nitty gritty.