Overview

Durango is a framework that allows developers to build Adobe® AIR™ applications that can be customized by end-users. Durango allows developers, designers and end-users to easily mashup independent components to create new applications or extend existing Durango-enabled applications. These "mashable" components can be visual or non-visual (e.g., web services). Designers and developers can rapidly create prototype applications and then generate Adobe Flex® MXML source projects for further development. End-users can take parts of their favorite applications and bring them together in new ways.

Durango was originally released on Adobe Labs in November 2008. The Labs information is still up-to-date, and can be found here.

Features

Drag and drop components

Durango takes care of all the hard work so it is easy for a developer to build a reusable component, to make their application a source or consumer of reusable components, and to enable an application to be a receiver of components. Durango offers the following drag-and-drop functionality:

Enable identification of reusable components in a running application

Handle drag-and-drop operations
Clone the components in the target application
Hook component into running application

Connect components to each other

Durango also assists end-users and developers in making connections between Durango-enabled components. A component can accept inputs and produce outputs. The framework tries to intelligently connect components together (e.g., a component that provides a text output would be automatically connected to another component that expects a text input). At runtime, the end-user or the developer can inspect these connections and reassign them or disconnect them as appropriate.

Publish and reuse web services

Durango also provides a way to publish and reuse web services. A developer could drag and drop any web service which has been encapsulated into a Flex component (even when that component has no UI) from a palette (or web page) into their application and then enter some basic information such as subscriber keys or attributes/parameters into the service's "inspector" or "properties panel".

Automatic code generation

Designers and developers can rapidly create prototype applications and then generate Flex Builder projects for further refinement in Flex Builder. If the component developer has elected to publish their source code on the internet, that code will be fetched and incorporated into the project. Otherwise, the component will be included in it's compiled form.