Introduction
The Adobe Flash Platform is the leading web design and development platform for creating expressive applications, content, and video that run consistently across operating systems and devices and reach over 98% of Internet-connected desktop users. The Flash Platform consists of an integrated set of technologies—including client runtimes, tools, frameworks, servers, and services—that provide everything you need to deliver applications, content, and high-definition video to the widest possible audience.

Adobe Flash Player
The user experience when interacting with traditional web content created with HTML and JavaScript has changed dramatically over the years, progressing from simple links and multiple, discrete pages to single page "applications" with asynchronous data calls and interactive controls. The experience, however, is still limited by the objects that are available in the browser object model. This is where Flash Player comes in.

Adobe Flash Player is a browser plugin or Active X control that has a much richer object model and rendering engine that allows developers to include more highly expressive and interactive content in web applications. To include this richer content, you create a SWF file (a compiled bytecode file which is what Flash Player can render) using some developer tool and then reference this SWF file in your HTML page. When the HTML page is parsed by the browser, the SWF file is downloaded and run by Flash Player in the browser window.

Adobe Flash Professional
Adobe creates many tools for creating SWF files including Flash Professional, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, and more. Each tool caters to different developer and designer skill sets. Adobe Flash Professional, the original tool for creating SWF content, is a timeline-based tool targeted at designers or more visual developers. With this IDE, you use drawing tools, pre-built components, and ActionScript to create SWF files. ActionScript is the scripting language for Flash Player and is an inheritance based object-oriented scripting language based on the ECMAScript standard.

Adobe Flash Builder
Adobe Flash Builder (formerly Flex Builder) is an Eclipse-based development tool targeted at developers. With this IDE, you use the Flex framework to create SWF files. Flash Builder accelerates Flex application development by providing intelligent code hinting and generation, refactoring, compile-time error checking, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design for laying out and styling user interfaces.

Adobe Flex
Adobe Flex is a free, open source framework comprised of a library of ActionScript classes and executables to help you more quickly and easily develop, compile, and interactively debug applications. The Flex framework includes classes for over 100 extensible components, including UI controls (buttons, list boxes, sliders, steppers, data grids, charts, and more), containers (VGroup, HGroup, Panel, Form and more to help you build adaptive application interfaces), managers (for styles, drag and drop, focus, popups, cursors, browser history and deep links, and more), remote procedure calls (HTTP requests, web service calls, and Flash Remoting requests), formatters, validators, and utilities.

ActionScript and MXML
You create Flex applications (SWF files built with Flex) using two languages: ActionScript and MXML. ActionScript is an inheritance-based object-oriented scripting language based on the ECMAScript standard. MXML is a convenience language; it provides an alternate way to generate ActionScript using a declarative tag-based XML syntax. When you compile an application, the MXML is parsed and converted to ActionScript in memory and then the ActionScript is compiled into bytecode, your SWF file. Although you never have to use MXML, it is typically used to define application interfaces (for layouts, the MXML code is usually more succinct and understandable than the corresponding ActionScript would be) and ActionScript is used to write the application logic.

Adobe AIR
The applications built with Flash or Flex run in the browser with Flash Player and have all the benefits of browser-based applications, including anywhere access, easy deployment (no installation necessary), simple updating, and consistency across all operating systems and browsers. They also have all the limitations of browser-based applications, including no offline access and the confines of the browser's security sandbox which keeps them from interacting with the user's computer outside the browser window. In order to get the best of both worlds, Adobe introduced Adobe AIR, a cross-operating system runtime and set of tools that enable developers to deploy HTML, Ajax, and Flash Platform applications (SWF files) to the desktop. An emerging design pattern for applications is to deliver a browser-based version for all users and a desktop version for more active or power users. You can use tools such as Flash Builder and Flash Professional to create SWF files for both web and desktop applications. If you create both types of applications, you can also share code from separate code libraries.



Adobe AIR runtime
In order to install an AIR application, users must have the Adobe AIR runtime installed which is the cross-operating system runtime used to install, manage, and run AIR applications. To provide a seamless install experience for users, you can create native installers (DMG, EXE, DEB, or RPM files) or a badge installer (implemented as a button on a web page). Both will check to verify whether the correct version of the AIR runtime is installed and if necessary, download and install it before the AIR application is installed (for native installers) or downloaded and installed (for a badge installer). The applications on the Adobe AIR Marketplace are delivered using badge installers.


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