As everyone knows this is a major drawback of AIR right now (I don’t know how many will agree to this statement), and I am not sure Adobe has plans to get it done. This itself makes most developers not to go with AIR. Another problem with AIR is that it is a client runtime, and the destination machine has to install it separately. If you need to deliver your applications in a CD/DVD as a projector, AIR is not the best solutions. For that there is MDM Zinc.

Interestingly, people started to think about this drawback in AIR and started delivering some interesting applications. SHU is one of them, which packages the AIR runtime in an executable along with your application file. This gives you a great relief as you will be able to deliver applications on a CD/DVD and we dont need the AIR runtime installed on the client machine.

There is one interesting post in Mike Chamber’s tech blog about his proof of concept on how to launch native applications from AIR. He has written a CommandProxy and this Command Proxy will launch the AIR applications, and the AIR application in turn use the Command Proxy to execute OS specific functions, like launching of external files, launching of native applications, etc.

Flex now allows you to have automated testing using testing tools. I have seen few examples from Borland and IBM.

Borland released SilkTest 2008 which can perform functional testing for Flex apps and SilkPerformer 2008 which can do load testing with AMF.

One more news is that Adobe is working with smaller testing tool builders like PushToTest as well to add Flex testing to their tools.

Their offering looks good since it’s free to certain amount of testing threads when you get the supported version. And reasonably priced for larger scale testing needs. Plus it is open source as well if you want to compile on your own.

Compare this to very expensive tools that Borland and other big players provide.

I think something like free and opensource PushToTest would be a pretty good match for the free and opensource Flex SDK.