Adobe Air and Rails

Rails
1

Is it possible to wrap a HTML5 jquery app that is served up by a rails
app
in an adobe air app that is installable on multiple platforms?

I don’t know much about adobe air, but the effect I am trying to achieve
is
to bring the web app to the desktop via an installable exe with not a
lot
of work.

2

Lee F. wrote in post #1059057:

Is it possible to wrap a HTML5 jquery app that is served up by a rails
app
in an adobe air app that is installable on multiple platforms?

I don’t know much about adobe air, but the effect I am trying to achieve
is
to bring the web app to the desktop via an installable exe with not a
lot
of work.

That sounds complicated to me. I also don’t know much about Adobe AIR,
other than it’s based on Flash and ActionScript so I wouldn’t expect it
to be directly compatible with HTML5 and JavaScript.

I’d say your best bet would be to do something like what Thoughtworks
did with their Mingle product, which wraps a Rails app in JRuby.

http://www.thoughtworks-studios.com/mingle-agile-project-management

3

On Tuesday, May 1, 2012 12:56:56 PM UTC+1, cipher_neo wrote:

Is it possible to wrap a HTML5 jquery app that is served up by a rails app
in an adobe air app that is installable on multiple platforms?

I don’t know much about adobe air, but the effect I am trying to achieve
is to bring the web app to the desktop via an installable exe with not a
lot of work.

So I guess this is for Windows as you mention an exe?

I don’t know much about Adobe Air, other than the few apps I have tried
have required runtimes to be downloaded directly from Adobe. One problem
with Air, AFAIK, is that you can’t distribute it yourself, so your users
are taken out of your app to get the Air files required to run your app,
so
you distribute the application files, but the runtimes from Adobe are
required to run your app first - this may have changed from what I
remember, it was many years ago. This may not be the image you wish to
portray to your users.

One possible solution, would be to have a look at SWF Studio, from
Northcode [1]. You will need to know some Flash or Flex, but you can use
SWF Studio to embed a browser, and any required files that can be
packaged
into the exe, and then extracted at your convenience. Taking it a step
or
two further, you might also be able to embed your complete rails app,
which
may not be what you want anyway, but could be an option.

The guys at Northcode are old school programmers and extremely helpful.
You
can download an unlimited free trial which will build your exe with a
24hr
expiration period, so you can build and test an unlimited number of
times
before you decide to purchase.

BW

Paul

[1] www.northcode.com

4

On Wednesday, May 2, 2012 12:16:57 PM UTC+1, paul h wrote:

lot of work.

So I guess this is for Windows as you mention an exe?

I should read better, just checked back and spotted you asking for
multiple
platforms - SWF Studio is Windows only by default although the guys at
Northcode do have a MAC solution in the background (called Thing), and
they
will do work for clients so may be able to provide something for Linux
if
you ask…

5

Thanks for the help guys.

The webkit build that bundles with AIR doesn’t support Web Sockets or
the
localStorage which we depend on, so it looks to be a dead end.

I had a look at the solutions mentioned above.

I am looking into using webkit.net to build a custom version of webkit
that
will simply wrap the html5 app.

Anyone have any experience with this?