Adobe's AIR: Niche or the future of desktop development?

CNET News.com: "AIR, or Adobe Integrated Runtime, is a download that lets Web applications run on a desktop. With AIR applications, people can work offline and drag and drop items like graphics or text between Web and desktop applications.

AIR is still in beta, but Adobe and many other software developers are already building applications on it. For Adobe's platform business, AIR gives the company a way to extend its investments in Web documents and Web development tools onto desktops across different operating systems."

Some of the new apps are very interesting, such as the eBay desktop. It will be interesting to see where AIR will go. It certainly seems more compelling than Java.