Brajeshwar

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.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch on his article titled Preparing For Apollo wrote about how Apollo will allow developers to take RIAs, whether they be built on Flash, HTML, JavaScript and/or Ajax, and turn them into desktop applications. Listen to his interview (37 mins) with Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s senior vice president and chief software architect.

Mike Chambers have a 10 minute Video Interview/Discussion with Christian Cantrell of the Apollo team. You can download the high resolution version of the video (~100MB).

I just downloaded the High Resolution Video and its awesome. Christian showed how he integrated Google Maps, which is online, with the Address and Contacts on his Desktop, which is offline (this is freaking awesome). Look at how he drags from the Flex Content to the HTML content. Watch carefully and you will realize that he is using Flex Builder on his Mac and a Mighty Mouse too. And yes, we want Multiple Native Windows and synchronous ActionScript - Javascript integration. Here are some screenshots if you can’t wait for your video to download. Get your Apollo Wallpapers.

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.