Publishing an Application (Flex)

In the previous tutorial we created the ever popular Hello World example application. But we still don't have a complete application, we only ran the application within the Flex Builder environment. What we want to do now is to publish our work and create an installer for it.

Publishing the Application

The first thing you need to do is open the application that you want to publish and make sure that it doesn't have any compile errors. The next thing is to click on the Project menu item in Flex Builder and click on Export Release Version. You should see the following dialog box:

If you want to you can click the enable view sorce option which will allow people to right-click on the application and view the source but we won't bother in ths case; go ahead and click next.
The next screen requests that you sign your application. If you already have a certificate you can browse out to it but I will assume that you don't so we can create a self signed certificate by clicking on the create button.

Once you click on the create button you will see the following dialog:

Fill in the information and save it somewhere, I saved mine in my documents and gave it a very clever name "selfSign".
When you click OK you should see the previous dialog filled in with your certificate and password:
Clicking next will then go through all the files in your application and check for dependencies and things of that nature. Since our application is so small it will return with the two required files.
Clicking finish here will create your helloWorld.air file:

Congratulations you have just exported your first AIR Application!