Air. The future of RIA. Unless you try and actually use it.

I've been wanting to write a swf encryptor for ages and last night I finally cracked ( As I'm working on something that I really don't want decompiling for various reasons ).
It was a toss up between Zinc and Air, but I opted for AIR 'cause in theory it is the future and therefore should have better support than Zinc.

So after all the hype surrounding Air I should just be able to google around, find out how to drag and drop, save a file and some other basics. I develop in Flex rather than cs3 'cause it's a million times better, but any search for Flex and Air just brings up examples using MXML. That's not great.

Eventually I found a hacky way to create an Air project in actionscript in Flex ( It's so convoluted it's untrue. You create a Flex project as opposed to an AS one as usual, tick the Air box, but on the part where you set the document class you alter the mxml extension to .as and it works ).
Getting there. Published the main class and up popped... nothing. More searching and I found out how to set it up ( A big thanks to Toby for blogging about it, without his words I'd have given up all together ).

Cool, got a window in place now. Close it, try publishing it again, and... nothing. Lot's more searching ( And swearing ) and I found out what the problem was, and the cure. If you don't exit your app correctly ( ie call an exit() after adding a listener to the close button ) then it doesn't actually exit correctly ( I found this out myself after a lot of messing about ).
When you publish an air app it runs something called adl.exe ( Adobe Debugging something. I've had enough air googling for a life time so can't face looking it up ) which runs the swf wrapped in the air api.
If you don't call exit() then when you close the app adl.exe keeps running. Ok, that's not the end of the world. What actually is though, is that you can only run one instance of adl.exe. If it's running after you've closed your app incorrectly, then you can't run any more air apps.
The beautiful thing is, it doesn't tell you. Flex doesn't tell you either. It's like they've ganged up to keep us in the dark.

Until I figured out the whole exit() thing, I was working with task manager open closing it down every time. The only solutions I found online were, yep, work with task manager open and...

Ok it kinda makes sense, and if you've got to call exit() then you've got to call it, but c'mon, this is the future of RIA and I've got task manger open to kill it ?
It all feels very beta-ish, from the hacky way to even create an Air project in Flex to that.

Once I got past these hurdles, I must admit it wasn't that bad. The lack of docs ( I only found this after I'd gone through a lot of pain ) has made it a less pleasant exercise than it should have been ( Oh joy, another mxml example for something I want to do with code ).

One weird thing which I'm putting down to me is that when I drag and drop a swf into my sexy little app it runs the app twice. I don't mean it opens another window, it just runs through all the code twice ( In alcon I was getting,
"wtf ?"
"wtf ?"
which was a bit of a give away ). A little kludgy check cleared that up.

At present we've got a simple little app which you can drag a swf onto, it then encrypts that with blowfish via the very nice Crypto library and you can then save that back out.

Next up ( And what I've been swearing at for the past hour or so ) is the decryption routines. Well, the code is being embedded and decrypted, it's just figuring out how to then make that byteArray run as a swf rather than just sitting there annoying me.

Squize.