During this 2 days event, we had the opportunity to delve into AIR APIs and put them in practice for the application contest.
Winners of the contest win a ticket for the Adobe MAX Europe conference in Milan, Italy.
All teams had one day (a few hours actually) to develop an original AIR application.
This year there were 2 tracks : Enterprise and Creative.
Together with a colleague we developed a Desktop Portal; the concept behind this application is to provide a way for users to work with micro applications instead of having to deal with large and monolithic applications.
The main technical characteristic of this application is that the 'widgets' are actually modules (swf) that are loaded at runtime when the user select them from the application list.
We integrated several widgets from the community : Calendar, Degrafa clock, Yahoo Weather and developed some custom ones : TODO List (with SQLite local persistence) and Mini-Browser.
The goal was also to provide a way for third parties to build their own widgets (modules) so that they could be shared (downloaded from a repository) and installed in the Desktop Portal.
Unfortunately, after a few hours we had to give up trying to load modules from the file system.
Indeed, in AIR, modules loaded from the file system are running outside the application sandbox with limited privileges.
If any one knows how to bypass this security restriction (either by 'signing' modules or loading them from a trusted store), please let me know ... the Adobe team present at the event could not help me on this topic.
Competition at this event was tough and we finally failed to win it (snif).
Anyway, this was a great event with outside activities (drop and paintball), great technology and motivated people.
Winners of the enterprise track presented an application called hAIRy a kind of small (rude) character used to interact with buddies (I actually didn't understand the whole concept but the demo was cool).
In the Creative track, the guys from Techmonk implemented an impressive and very funny game call BubbleTrouble and logically won the creative contest.
So that's it. I thank the Adobe benelux team for this nice event and hope I'll get an invitation for next year's AIR summer camp ...
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