More hot AIR

Tim Anderson's blog has a good, "fair and balanced" ;-) entry entitled Adobe AIR 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it.

To summarize, he lists

• Reasons to Love AIR: strong visuals, cross platform, fast
• Reasons to Hate AIR: limited extensibility, limited database access, security

Ron Schmelzer, a Zapthink analyst, also wrote about AIR security holes in Infoworld, with more security folks weighing in here. There is also a fairly curmudgeonly rant from I'm Mike on the proprietary nature of the Flash platform, which, BTW, can't be wished away by open sourcing the tool while keeping the underlying platform locked up.

By the way, this is not to say that Flash/Flex is bad per se, or that it is any worse than other proprietary platforms like Microsoft Silverlight. In fact there are many good reasons for Ajax developers to use Flex when needed to add graphic/audiovisual capabilities not yet present in Ajax toolkits like Dojo (O'Reilly has a good article about Dojo and Adobe).

It is more to get a sense of urgency in the Ajax community that we gotta lotta work to do around robust look/feel, as well as some blocking and tackling work to do around the FUD that platforms like Flex/AIR have the database, security and data handling capabilities needed to work inside the corporate firewall.