MoonwalkAIR: Easy way to create AIR apps with JS

MoonwalkAIR provides:

  • binary to generate your app folder
  • script to run your app
  • script to build your air file
  • script to create self signed certificate thats necessary to compile AIR apps

Why

I (Daniel Lopes) started this project with main purpose to help me in the process of creating Pomodo (an AIR app made with JS). This project avoid some repetitive decisions about organization and will help you to be more productive with boring tasks like run/compile your app without an IDE. For now this project not try to be a framework or anything like that. If you like to use it and want help will be very wellcome.

Dependencies

  • ruby
  • rubygems
  • air sdk

What is generated for you:

When you call moonwalk command it will generate a folder structure where you will start your app. The content is this:


.
|-- LICENSE
|-- README
|-- app
|   |-- assets
|   |   |-- audio
|   |   |-- css
|   |   |   |-- jqtouch.css
|   |   |   |-- test.css
|   |   |   `-- theme.css
|   |   `-- images
|   |       |-- apple
|   |       `-- icons
|   |           |-- 128.png
|   |           |-- 16.png
|   |           |-- 32.png
|   |           `-- 48.png
|   |-- lib
|   |   |-- air
|   |   |-- jquery.js
|   |   `-- plugins
|   |       `-- jqtouch
|   |           |-- jqtouch.js
|   |           `-- jqtouch.transitions.js
|   |-- scripts
|   `-- views
|       `-- index.html
|-- bin
|-- config
|   |-- boot.rb
|   |-- build.yml
|   |-- config.yml
|   `-- update_config.xml
|-- descriptor.xml
`-- script
    |-- build
    |-- certificate
    `-- run

Installing

gem install moonwalkair

Using

Creating your app

It's easy to get up and running, just run the follow command to get all folders and files in the right place.

moonwalk my_app

AIR SDK

After generate your app you need to point what is your AIR SDK path in "my_app/config/config.yml"

Certificates

AIR apps need a certificate to be compiled, for development and tests purpose you can create a self signed certificate with the following command:

script/certificate -p your_password

Running

Now you can run your APP with:

script/run

Building

To build your app you should have a certificate file in config, after that just call the following command and type your password. This command also minify and obfuscate all your css and js files.

script/build

Developing your APP

By default your folder will be created with jQuery and jQtouch (all animations will work if you use AIR 2.0 Beta) but you can use any other JS Library. Just remove default folder inside "my_app/app" folder and place your prefered JS files, you also need to update "my_app/config/build.yml". Now everytime you call script/run or script/build it will load the correct files.

AIR apps depends of a descriptor file, inside the "my_app/descriptor.xml" you can define things like window size, chrome, app name and etc. Open this file and customize it at your taste.

You will work most of time in app folder and only thing you need to know is HTML/CSS and Javascript. You will also need to know how AIR api works, and recommend these links: