Apollo - the next Killer App?

Today, Apollo caught my undivided attention when I saw the post from a Rich Inter Application Mountaineer, Ryan Stewart. Ryan wrote about How eBay is developing with Adobe’s Apollo. Ryan talks about San Dimas, an experimental Apollo powered project from the eBay Developers and EffectiveUI.

San Dimas uses Apollo and it can take advantage of the desktop and provide awesome capabilities (unlike a typical Flash Application) like local storage and desktop notifications very easily. Alan Lewis, the technical evangelist of San Dimas, mentioned that one of the big advantages of the desktop model is improved caching. For instance there is a web service call to go out and grab the entire tree structure of eBay’s categories. In XML format, this is about a 20 meg download. With Apollo, it can be called this once and cache it on the local machine so that the application never has to make the calls to get subcategories. This means fewer calls to the server and better performance.

What is Apollo?

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.

What have you learnt from all these talks?

Apollo will support File API, based on Flash Player 9, Windowing API, HTML within Flash based content, Apollo specific Flex components, Drag & Drop.