Adobe AIR support for Flash Player in HTML Applications after 2020

[dsmithto]

Bear with me, I am new to Flex, and I have inherited quite large product developed on the Flex 3 framework.

Our application is currently a Web application that runs in a browser using the Flash Player plugin. With this platforms end-of-life approaching, we have investigating Adobe AIR as a way to extend the life of our product beyond 2020. 

We have successfully packaged our code for AIR, with a few tweaks, it seems to work.  However, to our dismay, it seems to still have a dependency on the system installed Flash Player.  While our application is written largely in Flex 3, it is launched from an HTML landing page, and there is a non-trivial amount of JavaScript code called through the ExternalInterface.

After a little digging, I found that AIR applications that are initiated with an HTML page is significantly different than one initiated with an SWF.  An HTML application runs flex code in the system installed Flash Player, whereas a Flex application does not use the Flash Player.

So it appears to me that this AIR solution does not resolve our Flash Player EOL issue. So the questions are:

1. Does Adobe plan to support AIR applications in this configuration beyond the 2020 Flash Player EOL?
2. Is there some option that I am unaware of to allow Javascript to be called from Flex in AIR without involving Flash Player.
3. Or is my only option to rewrite my JS code in AS3?

Thanks in advance.

[zwetan_uk · Accepted solution]

The lazy way is to keep the HTML page loading a SWF in Adobe AIR

• as long as a Flash Player plugin can be installed on the system it will work
• you will have to plan an installer that check for that
• it will ultimately limit what you can do,
  eg. Adobe AIR purpose is to be independent of the browser

The smart way is to port those JS dependencies to AS3

• you deal only with AS3 within Adobe AIR
• no need to check or care about a Flash Player plugin installed on the system
• Anything done with JS through the ExternalInterface would probably be easier to implement just using the Adobe AIR API

So it appears to me that this AIR solution does not resolve our Flash Player EOL issue.

that's not where the problem is

Adobe AIR not gonna re-architecture your SWF-based app using magic, that's your job

so, list all the AS3 <--> JS interaction occuring in the app, eg. what specific Browser/Web API are used and why?
then document yourself about Adobe AIR and find the equivalent API to port the JS code to AS3

it is all very well documented here

Adobe AIR * Building Adobe AIR Applications

[Leo Kanel]

Another idea might be to check on Apache Royale. This is the Next Gen Flex framework, which allows to 100% HTML / JS compile. If you have many dependencies on js libs, I would definitely had a look at it.

[mattr8755445]

I had a similar problem, where I wanted to run Flashplayer inside AIR, but also wanted to make sure that the user didn't need to have Flashplayer installed. In older versions of AIR, you can compile your project with a Flashplayer included, so that your app will always run, even if the user doesn't have Flashplayer. Unfortunately, I think AIR 21 was the last version with this option, and I don't know if you can do it in newer versions.