Recently I have been doing some research on Adobe's alpha software that was code named Apollo. This is very exciting software that is going to make it much easier for web developers to become desktop application developers. Yesterday, Adobe changed Apollo to its official name AIR, which stands for Adobe Integrated Runtime. They also released the beta version of the AIR SDK and to go with it the beta version of Flex Builder 3 ( which was codenamed Moxie ). ...

This is very exciting because it makes it very easy to use what you already know to make a desktop application. In the first release, Adobe is focusing on helping you create occasionally connected ( to the internet ) desktop applications. I am very excited to have the opportunity to build desktop applications for clients and myself to do some of the tasks I already know how to program on the web.

The Apollo runtime allows file I/O, so you can read and write quite easily to the computer. It is cross platform and version 1.0 will allow you to build stuff that will work on Macs, PCs and shortly after release, Linux as well. The new beta build has also bundled SQLite functionality so you can have a simple database that you can count on being on all systems.

If you want to find out more, check out AIR on Adobe labs.