FOSSwire

Peter walks you through the process of installing the new Adobe AIR beta, installing AIR apps and how to uninstall everything too.

NOTE: Adobe AIR isn't an open source product, but I think it's worthy of covering anyway due to its potential for bringing greater application compatibility to open source platforms.

Building applications that work across multiple platforms is always a challenge, but the web has provided a solution for some of those problems, by inherently being a cross-platform medium.

Sometimes the web isn't powerful enough, however, and there is no replacement for a desktop application.

Adobe's AIR platform is designed to bring the ease of development and cross platform support of the web and combine it with the benefits of desktop applications.

AIR is a framework for Windows, Mac OS X and now Linux that allows you to build lightweight desktop applications. It is worth mentioning that AIR isn't open source, and is obviously designed in part to push Adobe's platforms, such as Flash, which also aren't free and can be troublesome on Linux and Unix systems.

Ignoring that, Adobe AIR for Linux 1.1 Beta was released a few days ago and allows you to run pretty much any AIR application already written on your Linux system.

Unfortunately, the installation is a little cumbersome and could be a stumbling block unless you know how to use the command line.

The installation does work, however, and AIR applications then seem to run pretty well (I tried Twitter client TweetDeck and it appears to work just as it does on Windows and Mac OS X).

In my book, anything that opens up the Linux platform to more application support can only be a good thing, and despite AIR not being free software itself (it is free of charge, but doesn't meet the FSF definition of free software), I think this is a positive step and definitely worth it if you're already a user of AIR apps on other platforms.

You may want to take a look at the release notes and then download the beta.

Gambas is a development environment and platform for Linux and Unix systems. It uses a custom programming language, similar to (but not the same as and not compatible with) Microsoft's Visual Basic.

Gambas allows you to put together Qt and GTK+ interfaces with drag and drop ease and connect them to code, in a very similar way to Visual Basic on the Windows platform.

While something similar to VB as a language and platform will probably be unpopular with many Linux and open source enthusiasts, using the Gambas environment is one of the easiest ways to rapidly develop a graphical application for deployment on Linux/Unix systems.

The Gambas IDE bears a striking resemblance, again, to the Visual Basic IDE and brings together source editing, drag and drop GUI design and project compilation and debugging from a single interface.

One of the major attractions to this platform is its support for Rapid Application Development (RAD) and its visual approach to programming. Even if you have only a little programming experience, you can quickly put together a graphical program for almost any desktop environment.

Obviously, a development platform like Gambas isn't suitable for all projects. What I think this certainly has utility for is for very quickly building graphical applications to automate certain tasks, for example.

Gambas offers probably one of the quickest and simplest ways to build a graphical application for Linux. Anyone with a little Visual Basic experience will very quickly be able to pick it up and start developing simple applications.