Shu vs. Adobe AIR

Shu is another Adobe flash wrapper, just like Adobe AIR but some of features look sound great for developers and users alike. The significant feature is that allows you to by pass installing AIR runtime to the user's system instead running the standalone applications on PC or Mac. Shu applications can also able to run from a CD or network share without installation. For developers, Shu provides a toolkit of commands to extend the system capabilities of your AIR application, "features include, controlling external applications, opening external files, database connectivity and control, system path retrieval and screen capture functionality". Just below the facts that Adobe AIR currently does not support the features, but Shu does.

AIR does have a number of drawbacks;

• AIR applications must be installed in order to run.
• AIR applications will only run on a machine with the AIR runtime installed
• AIR applications can not be run directly from a CD
• AIR applications can not open files such as word documents or PDFs
• AIR applications can not execute other applications
• AIR application can only make use of the built in SQLLite database, but Shu support MySQL instead of SQLLite

Let's see how Adobe AIR will approach and support more features in the coming ahead.