On the AIR tip, here's the thing. Desktop application development is an
entirely different beast than website application development and Flash
website development. You must be extremely conscientious about your
memory management with desktop applications because they might be
running for days or even weeks at a time, whereas website apps and Flash
sites will only be running for maximum a few hours.
In this way, AIR is inviting trouble because they're attempting to bring
Desktop development appealing to the masses, when really, the masses
have no idea what they're getting into, or what they're subjecting their
users to. Of course, you gotta learn sometime and all the memory
management stuff you learn can be applied to your Flash sites, as well.
This expose by Grant Skinner is important specifically because of Adobe
AIR more so than anything else. I was developing Flash desktop
applications with Flash wrappers and Director for a few years so I know
a lot of the pitfalls, one of the biggest being tight memory management.
This extremely bad memory leak in AS3 is a death knell for AIR. Until
it is fixed, AIR can no longer be seriously considered as a reliable
platform for desktop application development. People are better off
using AS2 and one of the other wrappers out there. There's just no room
for terribly bad memory leaks like this in the world of desktop
application development, especially when they're completely out of your
control even when you do everything right and you have no way of fixing it.
Adobe has really dug themselves into a deep hole here.
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