A good friend of mine asked what's the difference between the dmdscript/fastcgijs/gtkjs stuff I'm doing and Adobe AIR.
I've not really looked at Adobe AIR much, noticed that it was mentioned on the extjs site, so I thought I'd do a quick "what's the difference"..
So what's the key differences
For Adobe AIR
- Backed by a huge company with unknown reasons for hooking you in.
- Lot's of support for Adobe technology, but any other libraries, you can forget about.
- Probably written in C++ or C, so there are probably a few nice security holes difficult to find in the memory allocation. Even if you did have access to the source - it would be a pretty complex task to write bindings for libraries.
- Great support for Windows, pretty good for Mac, and bugger all for other un*x's
For GtkJs / Fastcgijs / dmdscript
- Absolutly no support ;) - obviously only done, because it's interesting and fun!
- Lots of support for any open source library, as long as you are willing to waste a few days working out how mindblowingly simple it is to write bindings.
- Written in D, which makes it pretty secure (well if you fix some of the bugs in my generator to do a small amount of sanity checks). And due to the fact that it's so similar in syntax to Javascript that makes the whole process of moving slow parts into compiled code considerable simpler than any other scripted language..
- Great support for linux, and it might just work on any other platform, as long as you can find someone who knows those platforms.
Personally I think the Adobe AIR idea is pretty good, Javascript is a good basis for a language. But to be honest for the reasons above, I would not touch it with a barge pole..
