Adobe Air is Flash + WebKit + SQL Lite on the desktop. As a Flash developer you can dive right in and use the Air extension for Flash to publish your beautifully crafted swfs and AS code into an installable cross platform desktop app. However, the flash projector has been around for a while doing similar things.
The SDK is free for download but Aptana provides a rather neat eclipse based IDE in which to work. Handily the new project wizard allows you to import a multitude of Javascript libraries making it incredibly easy to get a new project up and running with your preferred initial setup.
The application flow could be easily envisaged as follows:
- On DOM Ready read the local xml file
- For each site element in the xml create an LI element with the appropriate display and action elements
- Fire off a jquery ajax call for each site
- Use the response code to formulate a class for the LI to change its display
- Fire off any notifications if the response code has changed i.e. e-mail, notification window, twitter post
- Set a timeout before checking again
- On window close parse the unordered list back into xml and write it to the persistent file
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