Flex applications serve as the presentation tier. Unlike page-based HTML applications, Flex applications provide a stateful client where significant changes to the view don't require loading a new page. Similarly, Flex and Flash Player provide many useful ways to send and load data to and from server-side components without requiring the client to reload the view. AIR is intended to be a versatile runtime environment that allows existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct a more traditional desktop-like program. Adobe positions it as a browser-less runtime for rich Internet applications that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than a fully-fledged application framework. The differences between each deployment paradigm provides both advantages and disadvantages. For example, a rich internet application deployed in a browser does not require installation, while one deployed with AIR requires the application be packaged, digitally signed, and installed to the user's local file system. However, this provides access to local storage and file systems, while browser-deployed applications are more limited in where and how data can be accessed and stored. The practical application is that any content that can be hosted on a server can also reside on a desktop without internet connectivity. This allows students to view materials, interact with discussion boards, complete quizzes and submit assignments while they are without connectivity. When the student acquired connectivity, the information from the local machine updates the server-side implementation and server hosted information is refreshed on the students local machine. Through this process students can take courses and have interactive experience even if they have extremely limited connectivity. From a technical perspective this technology works by using a combination of MySQL, Cold Fusion, Flex and AIR. First, information maintained on a server in a MySQL database is pushed out, through Cold Fusion, to a student's computer, when connectivity becomes available. Notably, the data being sent to the students local machine is in the form of SQL strings, which allows for effective compression of the original data. On the local computer, Flex interpolates these SQL strings and converts them to Flash, which can then be viewed through an AIR application. Of particular interest to instructional technologists should be the deployment of this type of technology to areas where learners have very low connectivity or access to only centralized points of connectivity such as coffee shops or public wifi connections. For learners in these situations the ability to work at their own pace, while accessing rich internet applications, between periods of connectivity may prove to be the catalyst for a major paradigm shift for the way online learning is conceptualized. It should be noted that this paper lays out the conceptual and technical framework for an application. The application will be demonstrated, in full, during the conference and a recording made of the session for supplemental review purposes.
