Adobe Offers Apollo Sneak Peak

Adobe Systems today released the first iteration of its still-in-development Apollo software, which gives enterprises a single toolset to build and run Web 2.0-style applications.

The alpha version of Apollo, downloadable now, includes a software development kit and runtime environment for Apollo-built applications that can run on Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh systems.Apollo aims to bridge the gap between Web and desktop software. Apollo apps are inherently online-oriented, but also possess features usually found in desktop apps, such as rich user interfaces and the ability to launch from a desktop icon and run offline. Adobe (which acquired Macromedia) has had great success getting its Flash player on user desktops, letting most users instantly play back Flash applications. Adobe is hoping to have the same distribution success with its Apollo runtime "player."

Apollo both competes with other rich Internet application environments--such as Ajax or vendor-driven approachs such as Microsoft .Net or OpenLaszlo--and tries to assimilate them within the the Apollo development environment, providing a single tool for authoring a variety of types of rich applications. Because Ajax-style apps rely heavily on scripting and XML data sharing, Web 2.0 application creation can be more complex than designing simple Web sites. Apollo aims to hide that complexity.

The Apollo Developer SDK, sample applications and Apollo documentation are available at the Apollo Web site (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/).