A few hours ago, Adobe released a public version of AIR for Linux. This makes it the first cross-platform WebKit runtime that supports local SQLite storage. They are the only player in this space at the moment. Although many lump AIR in with Gears, Flash, and Silverlight, it is operating entirely in its own space and this should not be underestimated.

When CloudKit is released, likely on Monday of next week (quickly followed by Actionatr), it will include support for Adobe AIR but the pieces that are AIR-specific have been isolated into their own surprisingly small implementation classes. The end result may come in at less than 100 lines of code. Because of this, I have been working on a Qt wrapped version of the latest WebKit runtime that supports HTML 5 local SQLite storage without having to use a top level “air” namespace. If you have experience with the Qt toolkit or WebKit builds in general and would be interested in working on this cross-platform wrapper, please leave a message in the comments or send an email to my first name at this domain.

A big thank you to Larry Halff (Ma.gnolia, thmbnl) and Chris Messina for hosting Todd Ditchendorf (Fluid) and me on the Citizen Garden Podcast. If you’re interested in site specific browsers, check it out. CloudKit, the “data everywhere” platform powering Actionatr, is discussed along with Fluid, Prism, AIR and other juicy bits.