I hadn’t tried TweetDeckyet, and thought I’d give it a run. It requires Adobe AIR, and I thought I’d end up having to do the download/install dance. But lo-and-behold, the TweetDeck “Install Now” Flash button bootstraps a local install of AIR for me! No mess, no fuss, and the whole thing took less than two minutes and three clicks.
That’s cool and all, but we’re (mostly) JVM partisans here, so the inevitable question is: why doesn’t Sun use the same mechanism to drive deployment of the latest and greatest JRE/JavaFX? Flash functionally has 100% penetration, so it makes tons of sense to use it to make it trivial to get the JRE out there, at which point Java’s “native” update functionality can take over.
I’m not a RIA guru by any stretch, so maybe there’s a good reason why this isn’t done?
