Adobe To Port AIR To Linux

unityofsaints writes "Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash. This may be about to change because the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. No definite release date is mentioned in the interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, just a vague 'later this year.'"

Comments

Bzzt

[nacturation]

... a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software. AIR is the runtime, it is not web application development software. Flexbuilder build on top of Eclipse is the development software.

Not quite

[krog]

Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, as its only product to have recieved any kind of Linux implementation is Flash.

Adobe FrameMaker has run on more than 10 Unixes over the years, including Linux. Consider this nit picked!

Re:Not quite

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Adobe FrameMaker has run on more than 10 Unixes over the years, including Linux. Consider this nit picked!

Actually Frame Technology Corp. wrote Framemaker and ported it to many Linux/UNIX based OS's, Windows, and Mac OS. Once Adobe acquired Frame Technology Corp. they slowly dropped all the other versions until 2004 when they finally dropped Mac OS (who at the time comprised about half of their user base), making this product a Windows only. They basically put the whole program in the deep freeze with minimal updates to keep things working and no new features while they tried to migrate users to their home grown InDesign which was written originally for making magazines and was very unsuited to technical books (which was Framemaker's main target). In fact, they only recently started up development again (outsourced to India) when MadCap Software announced a new program called Blaze, which was billed as having every feature of Framemaker, but implemented from scratch with many new features and an order of magnitude better performance. As of 2007, they claimed to have no plans to support anything but Windows going forward.

Re:PDF?

[lexarius]

Acrobat Reader works fine on our Linux and Solaris machines.

No thanks.

[Speare]

I've not given Adobe a single dime in a decade*. First it was their overpricing themselves out of all but the students-and-pirates market. Then it was about using their corporate power to influence our government against the valid rights of individuals who were speaking out about data security and the freedom to read.

I'm sure some cash went from Canon or Apple to these jackasses, when I bought hardware that bundled their teaser products (which I don't use). I regret even that level of support for Adobe.

Re:No such thing as a closed source port to open O

[JustinOpinion]

You say that, and yet there are plenty of proprietary binaries available for Linux. Many distros have huge repositories of "non-free" stuff. Plenty of proprietary vendors make Linux binaries available (e.g. nVidia binary driver, Opera, Skype, etc. See also this list, much of which is distributed in binary-only form).

Yes, the vendor will probably only pre-compile binaries for the most popular architectures (32-bit x86 being the main one), and only for the most popular packaging formats (deb and rpm). But really that covers the vast majority of Linux users anyway.

Yes, it's a pain for the vendor to compile/package 2-8 versions instead of just one, but it's hardly the insurmountable obstacle you make it out to be.

Bad information

[Stan Vassilev]

Up until now, Adobe hasn't done much in terms of porting its applications to Linux, ...only .... Flash. ... the company has announced a Linux port of AIR, its web application development software...

Wow :)... Few corrections:

1) Flex Builder has had a public alpha for Linux for some time now.

2) There's Adobe Acrobat for Linux/Solaris/Unix

3) Most of the servers Adobe offers, like ColdFusion and Flash Media Streaming servers are available for Linux/Unix.

4) Adobe AIR isn't a web application development environment of any sort... that's completley messed up. It's the runtime component of a connected desktop app platform that supports HTML/CSS/JS/PDF/Flash content.

5) Macromedia (now part of Adobe) has made attempts to commercialize Dreamweaver/Flash/Freehand on Linux before utilizing Wine-compatible releases, but there was no enough demand to pay the bills, so the project was canned. I have the feeling they'll be trying this with selected Adobe CS applications again within 24 months, but it'll be expensive, so the market should show enough demand, and put their money where their mouth is, this time.

Re:No such thing as a closed source port to open O

[mhall119]

That is why they established the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and freedesktop.org. You say "My software runs on LSB 3.2 IA32 and IA64" and provide a .deb and .rpm for each and be done with it. It's no more difficult that supporting Win32 and Win64 and providing a .exe and .msi for each.

Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe!

[salimma]

The actual situation is most likely in-between the two extremes posited by parent and GP. Adobe has its own abstraction layer that they program against, so once they have a way to target GTK or Qt with that backend, compiling the applications should be quite straightforward.

(This layer is likely to be rather complex -- witness how long it took them to bring Photoshop to MacIntel)

Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that you're wrong. Adobe is actively trying to eliminate the vast majority of their GUI-library dependent code with the EVE2 and Adam libraries. I know these things because I am one of the researchers developing the data-limiting constraint language to be used. It is part of their core internal road-map to move all Adobe projects off of specific GUI dependence. Before any of you start talking "cross-platform", what Adobe wants out of cross-platform is not wxWidgets or the Mozilla-stuff; what they want is very similar to the AbiWord notion of cross-platform.