AIR and Thai Line-breaking

As mentioned in last post, I'm interested in Adobe AIR and want to evaluate its power. The quickest way to evaluate any development platform is to develop a real world application using that technology. So, here comes my top-secret project, the Blognone AIR Reader but unfortunately, it's failed so fast.

I follow this tutorial to create a simple RSS reader by AIR.

The first problem is this tutorial is for AIR beta 1 and AIR beta 2 comes with new sandbox security model. Then I need to modify the code to support the beta 2 runtime I installed. After that, I need to learn Spry for a little bit to know its functions and power. When everything is ready, I just find out that AIR browser doesn't handle Thai line-breaking !!!

From my investigation, AIR uses Apple's WebKit as its rendering engine and Adobe doesn't know that only WebKit is not enough for Thai people (Safari do line-breaking via ATSUI). Line-breaking is country-specific issue and need experienced i18n team to handle. Browsers with no line-breaker is unusable in Thailand.

Since AIR runtime is closed-source, I have no choice left, only wait for Adobe fix in future release. Anyway, I contact Ryan Stewart, AIR community evangelist at Adobe to pass this issue to Adobe i18n team. Hope that might help.