Adobe launches Apollo alpha
Adobe has made a new development tool, Apollo, available at the alpha stage. This is an unusual move for Adobe - one that is designed to stir interest in the developer community. But what's Apollo all about?
27 March 2007
Adobe, not renowned for making its new products available before the product actually ships, has been breaking the mould recently. It has made the beta of Photoshop CS3 available to everyone (though it times out quickly if you didn't have a licensed copy of Photoshop CS2 on your PC) and also provided access to Lightroom, a new tool for professional photographers, for months before it launched.
Adobe has now made Apollo, a very interesting development technology, available in its alpha version. Apollo, a tool designed to create rich Web applications, rides the 'Web 2' wave of interest in interactive technologies such as AJAX.
What's especially interesting is that Apollo applications aren't confined to the browser. Although they are coded using Web technologies (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) they can run on the desktop, just like normal applications. Apollo applications can also use OS features, such as drag and drop, clipboard access and desktop/system shortcuts.
It's a fascinating technology which has bags of potential. A good taster is Adobe's on-line demo for an ebay application - which can be used both off line and on line, and offers functionality which wouldn't be possible within the browser, such as semi-automating the process of adding an ebay listing. It also provides a far richer, more application-like, experience than working within the browser.
You can see the fascinating Apollo ebay demonstration on Adobe's Web site.
There's another interesting twist, too - because the development toolset is largely platform-agnostic, an application developed within Apollo doesn't require any additional work to run on a PC, Mac and even Linux - now that's a very attractive proposition for developers.
And, because the data behind an Apollo application sits on a remote server, it makes it possible to deploy applications such as e-learning tools, support tools and knowledge bases where the content is controlled centrally and replicated automatically when the user is on line.
For example, it could make for an amazing news experience - with instant updates within a rich application-like environment, it could rewrite the rules in terms of how a news Web site should behave.
It does open up some less attractive possibilities, too - the development of useful applets which provide a platform for annoying and uncontrollable advertising on the desktop, for instance.
With Microsoft trying to eat into Adobe's core business with its Expression range of graphics tools, it's no surprise to see that Adobe is fighting back.
To be fair, Adobe, now its portfolio includes Macromedia's product set, actually has a strong - if somewhat fragmented - set of offerings which are already competitive to Microsoft. It has a content-management server, in Contribute Publishing Server. It has a Web server platform with capabilities which rival .NET (and in some cases exceed it) with ColdFusion. It has sever-level tools for automatically creating documents from line-of-business systems (such as SAP), in Central Pro Output Server. It has a cross-platform development tool for creating rich Internet applications, in Flex. It has an enterprise-wide (and Web-based) rich communications system, in Adobe Connect (which was Macromedia Breeze). The list goes on.
There's no indication of when Apollo will move from alpha to beta, let alone when it will be officially launched, but this is a good opportunity to get a head start on an innovative and powerful development technology.
To find out more, or download the alpha version of Apollo, visit the Adobe Labs Web site.
