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onAIR 2008 London

The Adobe onAIR juggernaut roared into London earlier this week. This is the last stop in the current European leg of the tour that started in the US last year. The point of the tour is to increase awareness of the Adobe AIR platform amongst web developers; and if turnout is any gauge of that then I think they achieved their aim. I'd put attendance somewhere in the hundreds, and by all accounts the London event had been booked out for weeks.

Most of the US evangelists were in attendance including Lee Brimlow, Danny Dura, Ted Patrick and both Mikes (Downey and Chambers). Oliver Goldman of the AIR runtime development team gets my ‘hero of the day award’ though. Despite the airline losing his luggage he spent his day with individual developers, cheerfully tackling the most specific of technical enquiries.

The Brewery is a great venue for an event of this size and I have to praise the event staff which ran the day like clockwork. There was ample room for attendees, food and drink throughout the day, a steady WiFi connection and plenty of power cables to go around.

Mike Chambers opened the event with a brief introduction then passed over to UK platform evangelist Andrew Shorten for the keynote. Andrew outlined where AIR fits into the Adobe ecosystem then demoed a few AIR apps to show off some of the platform's functionality.

The rest of the morning sessions covered 'building your first AIR application'. Mike Chambers built a "helloworld" AIR app in Flex and Kevin Hoyt showed a similar process with HTML and Javascript. In fact, this is an important point about the itinerary: this was not a Flash and Flex charm offensive; about half the sessions were aimed at AJAX developers.

After lunch Mike handed over to Serge Jespers for a session about certification, deployment and updating. It turns out that Grant Skinner has been working on the AIR install badge. Although still in beta it seems very flexible. The rest of the afternoon alternated between guest speakers and Adobe staffers.

Jeremy Baines battled a few network problems to demo "AlertThingy", a FriendFeed tool, and a team from the BBC discussed their 'BBC Takeaway' application. On the AJAX front Dion Almaer from Ajaxian.com gave an impassioned talk about Google Gears and Andre Charland from Nitobi looked at compatible AJAX frameworks for AIR.

One of the most impressive AIR apps to date has to be Nicolas Lierman’s Google Analytics tool. He’s been working on it for about a year now and has recently been working with Google to make the project open source. A new release is due at the end of this month.

The afternoon’s Adobe speakers were Daniel Dura, looking at the AIR API, Oliver Goldman addressing security and sandboxing in the AIR runtime and Lee Brimlow finished up with his hilarious ‘AIR Conditioning’ talk.

I think AIR is a genuinely exciting technology and the onAIR tour is a great way to get up to speed. Look out for the tour in the rest of Europe as the second leg kicks off next month. All in all a very informative day.