Discussion of When Not to Choose AIR

April 18th, 2008

This morning, I checked out the new Flickr Code site. As a part of this site was a blog post on how one of the developers at Yahoo redeveloped the Flickr Uploader (actually I think he is still redeveloping). His platform of choice to provide a consistent cross-platform application was XULRunner. He states that real choice was between AIR and XULRunner.

What were the deciding factors? In his case it came down to two things: the ability to use external libraries, and multi-threading support. In his case - I think most of his evaluations were correct. For that specific application XULRunner made sense…for now. I think many of these limitations will change in the future for AIR. However, as AIR developers we have to be able to look at a situation and honestly evaluate if AIR is the best choice for that specific use case.

You can read the post and watch a video about it here (the video of the AIR vs. XULRunner starts at about 7:00)