It’s hip2b2

What is happening right now has been predicted by numerous computer scientists through out the years. As computing resources increase so will the applications that require it increase. Today, we are seeing movement towards virtualization both in the operating systems and the application side.

Java was previously mocked, as a development environment, a few years back because its “performance” will never make it to the enterprise. Now, we see Java as the corner stone of a lot of enterprise information systems. So is there space for another player? Adobe definitely thinks so. With the introduction of Apollo, Adobe aims to take a crack at the virtualized desktop application virtualization space. They have been pretty successful with their Adobe Flash platform already. They are now taking things a step further from the web to the desktop.

Adobe just announced that it’s much anticipated Apollo platform is now available for developers. The software developers kit can be downloaded at adobe.com/go/apollo.

Although this is the offic

ial release of the SDK, many developers have been working with Apollo for quite some time. Ryan Stewart recently covered the some of the better Apollo demos from an event they put on last month. See more on the launch from his ZDNet blog.

Here is a short from the Adobe Apollo site itself.

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 enables developers to create applications that combine the benefits of web applications – network and user connectivity, rich media content, ease of development, and broad reach – with the strengths of desktop applications – application interactions, local resource access, personal settings, powerful functionality, and rich interactive experiences.

I do not find particularly spectacular as most desktop environments already do support some form of browser integration. Linux’s Gnome and KDE utilize web-based themes to customize their user interface. MS Windows has something called the Active Desktop. Apple MacOSX desktop widgets are simply web scriptlets. The web has been moving to the mobile for quite sometime already. These applications being native on the desktop already have access to platform resources. However, the major advantage of Adobe Apollo is that it promises to be a truly cross-platform (hopefully not J2ME’s idea of being a cross-platform runtime).

So I took the liberty of downloading some of the Adobe Apollo demos from their website and discovered a few things about it.

• It is a ZIPPED archived. First thing is first, we need to get into the meat of the thing. So, I launched a binary editor on the AIR package file and immediately saw that it had a vnd.adobe.apollo-application-installer-package+zipPK mime type. This is unlike MacOSX widgets that are simple uncompressed directories.
• Definitely Web Stuff. Looking around at its contents, we can immediately see that it is full of nice standards compliant web stuff. It uses Flash, Javascript, HTML, OPML and other funky XML files. At least, it is true to form. It even uses a bunch of freely available open source JS code.
• Can run on a regular browser. This is pretty much expected.

So what is the Adobe Apollo runtime? Probably a highly tuned cross-platform web browser (rendering engine) with good support for Javascript, Flash, Flex and a whole lot of other goodies.

So, why bother with another runtime? Well, this is simply human nature. People just want more.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Web. 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.