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Adobe To Port AIR To Linux

Posted by kdawson on from the breath-of-fresh dept.

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.'"

7 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Bzzt by nacturation · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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.
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  2. Not quite by krog · · Score: 5, Informative

    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!

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    1. Re:Not quite by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:PDF? by lexarius · · Score: 4, Informative

    Acrobat Reader works fine on our Linux and Solaris machines.

  4. Bad information by Stan+Vassilev · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe! by salimma · · Score: 4, Informative

    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)

    --
    Michel
    Fedora Project Contribut
  6. Re:People use Photoshop to Dev the Web too Adobe! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.