Adobe brings AIR RIA tool to Linux

It's nice to see Adobe becoming more Linux friendly than ever.

As Novell's Mono project works on a port of Microsoft's Silverlight to Linux, Adobe announced that it has made available (in English only) the pre-release alpha version of AIR (Adobe Integrated Run-Time) for Linux on Adobe Labs today. The finished product -- AIR for Linux -- is expected to ship later this year and will include multipe language support.

AIR is a run-time that allows developers to use familiar web technologies including HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIA) on the Linux desktop without writing additional platform code. AIR currently supports Windows and Macintosh only.

Also on Monday, Adobe announced an update to its pre-release alpha version of Adobe Flex Builder 3 for Linux on its Adobe labs web site.

Adobe maintains that the recent release of Flash Player 9 with Linux support and its forthcoming Flex Builder 3 for Linux and AIR for Linux demonstrated a new openness to the open source operating system and opne source in general. To that end, Adobe announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation.