Since Flex 4.5, you have had the ability to develop and export your projects as Android, iOS and PlayBook mobile applications that behave as native ones.
You can also export your Flex mobile project as AIR desktop apps. Just open Flash builder, open your project and choose Project > Export release build. You can then export a “Signed AIR package for installation on desktop”, which means a classic .air file. Yesterday, a customer wanted to know how to run a Flex mobile application in a desktop web browser. Of course, I answered “Why would you do this ?”, and he gave me some good reasons.
His mobile application is connected to a CMS on the backend. Administrators of the application will be able to edit the content of the mobiles apps in a web application. Wouldn’t it be nice to get a live preview in the browser ? When you think of it, a Flex mobile project exports a SWF, so we should be able to run it as a web app. Of course, all the AIR APIs such as the accelerometer, or the SQLite access would be disabled, but we could have a live preview.
And it’s always a challenge for a mobile developer to demonstrate their work. Usually, they just record and publish a video of their app.
We’ll see in this tutorial how to create a Flex mobile project with Flash Builder 4.5.1, and how to publish it as a classic web application. Just follow these steps: