Alternatives to AIR?

No, no, no, this isn’t going to be an article about some crazy new breathing apparatus. Rather, it regards some new technology related to the web-desktop interface that I discussed briefly in my article yesterday. I stumbled upon this new program known as Adobe AIR. Today, however, while perusing the Gentoo mailing lists, I found that there is a program called Mozilla Prism. This seems to be along the same lines as AIR, but is produced by the Mozilla foundation. While reading the write-up on Prism, I also found that Micro$oft has also released a similar interface called Microsoft Silverlight.

With the links provided, you are all free to read up on each of these new interfaces. I’m still having trouble realising why such interfaces are even necessary. However, I’m the type of computer user that enjoys having separate applications for tasks, and this type of integration seems excessive to me. Let me say that, having not experimented with any of these three programs, that my opinions are, at current, unsubstantiated. However, the interfaces do seem like they could potentially provide numerous local and remote security exploits. I’m hoping that I will get the time to try out at least Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism sometime within the next couple weeks. I don’t really have any desire to try Silverlight, as it is manufactured by the empire.

|:| Zach |:|