Adobe Apollo - A New Frontier
Adobe has launched the beta version of Apollo, a cross platform environment that allows the developers to develop rich internet applications, that can run and behave as standalone applications on PCs, Macs and Linux machines.
Brief introduction
It all started with Macromedia Central. The main aim of Central was to provide a browser-free environment for displaying flash based content. However, it found a very limited adption. Main reasons for the failure is due to the fact that a Central client is necessary to display the content. Morover, complex coding is needed to communicate between different flash movies.
This is where Apollo proves to be entirely different. An Application created for Apollo, behaves as a standalone application which need not require any Central player kind of thing to run. Also, Flex content, the flagship product of Adobe used to build RIAs, can be deployed for Apollo.
Thus, Apollo, combines the best of both worlds by taking the user friendly web application to the standalone executable application that can run on PCs, Macs and Linux platform.
Technology behind
Apollo, is not a software product, instead it is a runtime environment much like the library files in a typical windows environment.
How it is useful
The best part of Apollo is that, now it is possible to build applications that can combine the best of Flex, Flash, pdfs and related files. Moreover the same application will behave similarly in different OS based platforms.
Through Apollo, it is possible to create offline, standalone desktop applications that can access the file system, communicate with OS resources, interact with other executable applications, save and retrieve personal user preference.
Together with this, it promises to be a better overall user experience, due to presence of Flash based richer grahics, Flex based interactivity, media conetent and the like.
Last but not the least, developers already familiar with Flash, Flex do not have to learn new coding technology to develop an Apollo application. Therfore ease of development is also achieved.
Limitations
Apollo, being an entirely new technology, is prone to several bugs and limitations. It is still in the pre-release stage and as such support is also very less. As of date there are very few coding samples and developer forums.
However, things are going to change, when Adobe releases the final version of Apollo later this year.
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