Packaging with ADT
ADT is a command tool to package and create installers for AIR based applications. It requires Java runtime, as it is primarily built using Java. All AIR installation files must be signed; in fact, we can generate a self-signed certificate using ADT for our application. Creating a certificate for the application means that the file has not been tampered since it was created. Also ADT creates a hash-key for the application due to which no two apps can have same keys. Using the following command on the console, we should be able to create self-signed certificate for our demoApp application. And the last attribute is the password that is set for the certificate.

adt –certificate –cn SelfSigned 1024-RSA demoCert.pfx passDemo

To package and distribute the application, we have to use the adt -package command. Here we specify the name of the installer file; in our case it is demoApp.air. We also specify all the files that were in the application folder so they can be added to the installer along with the XML descriptor file.

adt -package -certificate demoCert.pfx –password passDemo demoApp.air application.xml AIRAliases.js main.html select.html

The above command will result in a demoApp.air installer file being created in the application root directory. We can distribute this installer to be used on any system that has AIR runtime installed on it. This installer file creates the Startup Programs menu, desktop shortcut and copies the relevant files onto a specified destination.

Conclusion
Adobe AIR has opened up an avenue for web developers to create applications and also to package those applications on their own without the use of the development tools such as Java or .NET. This allows web developers to not just restrict their imagination to browser based apps but to foray into desktop applications without having to learn any new programming skills. With SQLite embedded database, file system access functionality, clipboard access, etc a web developer can create apps meant to do a multitude of functions, not possible with browser based apps.