Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Flash to the desktop: Adobe Apollo

Apollo from Adobe Labs seems worth watching closely. It appears to be an attempt to take widely deployed Flash applications out of the web browser and move them on to the desktop.

From the FAQ:
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that runs outside of the browser .... We ... are confident that we will be able to quickly get significant distribution of the Apollo runtime.

Apollo is targeted at developers who are currently leveraging web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax techniques to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications.

Apollo will provide a set of APIs to make it easy to develop connected applications that work while offline.
See also coverage by VentureBeat and the San Jose Mercury News.

Update: Niall Kennedy posts a detailed review.

Update: Two months later, video of a Google tech talk, "Flex, Flash and Apollo for Rich Internet Applications", is now available that includes several lengthy demos and gives a good feel for the product.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yet another worthless, ill-conceived "platform" that does nothing more than provide a bad layer of abstraction allowing you to bring the most limited and worthless web principals (html/javascript/flash) to the desktop. No thanks.

Bud Gibson said...

Even after Niall's piece, I'm not sure from a practical standpoint why you would want to take this out of the browser. The browser is already deployed making your apps universally accessible.