Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Apollo -- check it out

Apollo Alpha has been released. I'm excited to try it out:
https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=labs%5Fapollo

Here is a nice look at some of what can be done for those interested:

Example presentation of Apollo (showcasing Ebay sample app)
http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2007/91259.php

this is an older demo from Dec 2006, shows Apollo with Amazon's api's, Google Maps mashup with client-side address Vcards, and some other items (like Flex):
http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-apollo-demos

One intriguing thing about Apollo is that you can use existing web tech to build apps that interact with and run on the client This demo shows an application built using Adobe's Flex technology on the front end (View), and using Ebay on the back end to deliver data to the client. But that is just one incarnation. Apps could also be built with html+css and a database, and run equally well on the Apollo cross-OS runtime.

The API for synchronizing data online/offline, and accessing the file system, is what holds a lot of the power for developers (imo). I'm sure you can find other benefits. Apollo's APIs simplify the process for handling this. There are clever ways of doing it now ( dojotoolkit.org , etc), but they use Flash files, and other client side workarounds to get the job done, and are limited in the size, etc that you can save on the client (without changing preferences, etc).

Basically Apollo extends the reach of web dev tools (not having to write code in Java, C++, VB, etc, but instead using html, css, AJAX, Flash/Flex, etc.) to deliver applications that run on a user's machine as well as online. It enables web app developers with an extra set of API's along with a cross-OS runtime that they can use to extend the reach of their apps..... it has been developed from the paradigm of the 'mostly connected to the internet' that the world is moving towards.

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