Adobe® Air® and Adobe® Flash® Player Runtime Distributor

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment developed by Adobe Systems for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application. AIR is intended to be a versatile runtime environment that allows existing Flash, Actionscript, or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct a more traditional desktop-like program. Adobe positions it as a browser-less runtime for rich Internet applications that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than a fully-fledged application framework.

A rich internet application deployed in a browser does not require installation, for example, while one deployed with AIR requires the application be packaged, digitally signed, and installed on the user's local file system. This provides access to local storage and file systems, while browser-deployed applications are more limited in where and how data can be accessed and stored. Rich Internet applications store users' data on their own servers in most cases, but the ability to consume and work with data on a user's local file system allows for greater flexibility.