New web app that I would also like to port to Android - The question is: Air or Flex?

Question

I'm very familiar with the Adobe Air runtime, and quite handy with the workings of a Flex application, but I'm unsure which technology I should use if I would like to have a multi-platform application able to be deployed to the Web foremost, Android Phone secondly, and Desktop third.

I understand that AIR is probably the route I should go, but I'm very conflicted on how integrated it is with Android? Is it easy to do now, or still a headache (I haven't read about it in ages)? I've seen the new Flex 4 deploying to Android very smoothly, but I've heard it's difficult to write an AIR program with Flex.

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Answer 1

I want to clear up some confusion:

I understand that AIR is probably the route I should go, but I'm very conflicted on how integrated it is with Android? Is it easy to do now, or still a headache (I haven't read about it in ages)?

AIR is very integrated with Android through the runtime, officially known as "AIR For Android". Adobe released it recently and people already have applications in the Android store. The tooling introduced in Flash Builder Burrito makes it very easy to build Flex applications for Android. I expect Burritio to become a formal release early next year.

I've seen the new Flex 4 deploying to Android very smoothly, but I've heard it's difficult to write an AIR program with Flex.

It is borderline trivial to convert a Flex application to an AIR application. However, switching a "standard" Flex or AIR application to AIR for Android will most likely require code optimization due to device resources. I would anticipate sharing 60-80 percent of the code base, but the UI will most likely require rework because of the smaller screen size and component management will have to be done differently because of memory / processor requirements on a mobile device.

Answer 2

I have not tried it, but Adobe acts as if it's fairly simple to adapt from straight Flex to Flex within AIR.

What's more important is what language the app is already in. If it's in JavaScript and HTML, then it would stand to reason that adapting that to AIR's HTML5/Javascript engine would be quicker and less frustrating than porting it to Flex and adapting it to AIR.

Additionally, it gives you a codebase you can more easily adapt to iPhone if you want, using PhoneGap or Titanium, which are HTML5/Javascript based as well.

I've had a couple of projects end up withering on the vine because I went back and forth between technologies (and in parallel allowed feature creep to make them more and more monolithic and daunting undertakings). So, IMO, the development paradigm to use is the one that will allow you to spend more time coding and less time second guessing yourself.

Answer 3

You have me scratching my head here.

AIR is a runtime, not an application development framework. Flex is an application development framework, not a runtime.

You can author your application in Flex and deploy it via Flash to the phone and web and deploy it to the desktop with AIR.

Now, if you were implying that you would develop your web app using HTML/JS/etc..., deploy that to the desktop with AIR, and then try to rewrite the whole thing in Flex, I agree... that's not a reasonable approach.

My advice is that you stick to one stack.

So, if you're going to do Flex, do Flex all the way. If you're going to do standard web stack, do that all the way (there are a lot of mobile web dev frameworks out there - jQuery Mobile is probably one of the better ones, but Ext.JS/Sencha is out there too).

Make sense?