Adobe just released Apollo Alpha to Adobe Labs today (19 March 2007). Apollo is the code name for Adobe’s new cross-operating system runtime environment. Apollo will allow for the development of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that leverage existing web technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, Flash and Flex and deploy them to the desktop. These RIAs can then run on any system that has the Apollo Runtime installed without having to code different versions of your applications for use on Windows and Macintosh (not sure if a Linux version will appear by lauch time).

I’ve been using MDM Zinc for developing RIAs and creating desktop applications for a while now. Seems Apollo is lacking native database connectivity, which I think is a big turn off to anybody doing any heavy RIA type stuff. This may hurt Apollo initially. Supposedly you can leverage some of the data manipulation and XML socket classes available in ActionScript to make datbase connections, but that just doesn’t seem to be very practical.

The one advantage to Apollo as opposed to the other desktop RIA development software such as MDM Zinc, is that the Runtime exists on the user’s system and doesn’t have to be packaged with the applications. This will make Apollo based RIAs a lot skinnier than Flash Projectors and Zinc applications which carry the extra load of including Flash Player.

This is an alpha release which means it is far from completed so it will be interesting to see how things shape up as time goes on. You can download it for free from Adobe Labs.

I’m going to download this and start playing with it. I’ll keep you posted.

_mt

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Technology, Flash, Interactive Media, Rich Internet Apps, Flex 2.0, AJAX. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.