Adobe AIR

Having recently seen eBay Desktop, I started wondering how this approach to information searching and viewing could be used at the company I work for.

We currently have several customers for whom we produce CIF catalogues (flat file catalogues, CSVs, to those not in that business) containing lists of products and the discounted prices that have been allocated to their personal account. Sometimes we even produce Excel spreadsheets for customers so they can import. We are also about to embark a project to develop, in ColdFusion, a CXML gateway from Ariba into our back-end system (Microsoft Navision).

I was wondering, could we have a Desktop version of our catalogue instead? It'd provide a massive amount of functionality, but it would let us control the layout and the UI and, more importantly, provide up-to-date pricing via the use of Web Services or XML-generating ColdFusion on our server.

To this end, I've installed the Air runtime and SDK. I am using Eclipse with Aptana and the Air development plugin to develop. So far, I've only done something very simple, but I've had far more success with this than the last Adobe product I was excited about (which was Flex).

I probably need to find some way of producing something usable before my manager understands it.

The story continues...