My hope is that when Flex developers talk about how great Apollo is, you also talk about what it can do for AJAX. Why is that? Well, because despite being an Adobe product, Apollo adoption won’t be driven by Flash initially. It will be driven by people who are making full use of AJAX and building very complex applications within the browser. By far the most powerful feature of Apollo is its ability to give AJAX developers a way to run their applications in a desktop environment.
Apollo really shores up AJAX and patches holes in many of the weaknesses:
AJAX runs in a browser, Apollo frees them from that “browser mentality.”
AJAX suffers from security issues, but Apollo will provide a security sandbox which AJAX developers can take advantage of.
Apollo gives AJAX developers access to the file system meaning that AJAX applications will be able to do some level of online/offline synchronization. If Google extended the life of AJAX by rejuvenating a 5-year old technology, Apollo will do the same by another couple of years. I still think that AJAX is a dying technology. In the next 2-3 years it won’t be able to compete with more robust technologies like Flash and WPF.
The world of RIAs is very young, and the business value is still being debated. But in the end, RIAs will see widespread adoption and people won’t be able to deliver the same kinds of experiences with AJAX. I think Adobe has shown a lot of foresight with Apollo. By bringing the best AJAX developers into the loving arms of Apollo, they’ll be exposed to other Adobe products as they mature.
Flex 2 is a great technology, but it is still very young. As the platform grows and more people begin to look at it, adoption will undoubtedly skyrocket. Apollo could very well be the bridge between the super AJAX developers and the Flash Platform.
About Ryan Stewart Ryan Stewart holds an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is now a Rich Internet Application developer and industry analyst. After graduating from Penn, he spent two years developing applications for the Wharton School and pushing the idea of the web as a platform for learning. Ryan now lives in Seattle with his wife and runs his a consulting company, helping clients build and architect Rich Internet Applications. He tracks the web and Rich Internet Applications for ZDNet on The Universal Desktop (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/) as well as his personal blog, Digital Backcountry (http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com).
AJAXWorld News Desk wrote: Ryan Stewart believes that by far the most powerful feature of Adobe 'Apollo' will be its ability to give AJAX developers a way to run their applications in a desktop environment.
Brandon Ellis wrote: Hey Ryan,
I really don't think AJAX devs will move Apollo initially or otherwise. Here's my reason - AJAX devs *could* be doing this already via a XUL wrapper (like Songbird) or (a much more ghetto approach) using a swf wrapped in Zinc that loads a browser instance on top and runs the JS that way.
Those are two examples of how they could be building a user base for on/offline use but it's not happening. Also, these examples have no need for a runtime to be installed. I can't see waiting for the public Apollo release to figure this stuff out when it's perfectly doable now.
We'll see though
Ryan Stewart wrote: Hey Richard, Ajax will probably always have a use in making web sites better, but when it comes to building web applications, Ajax won't be able to compete. Development time is longer, the tweaks that are required for it to run correctly in every browser add headaches. Flash and WPF were designed from the ground up to deliver very rich, powerful experience and make it easy for developers. Thanks for commenting.
Also, queZZtion - Apollo is going to be free.
Richard wrote: AJAX a dying technology? I'd have to disagree. Flash, Flex and WPF will always be avoided by certainly people because they're proprietary. Developers will start banging on the doors of Firefox and Opera to add more features to AJAX, and they'll do so (you see it already in Firefox 2.0 betas), then developers will start pressuring Microsoft and others to follow suit.
I don't expect Flash, Flex or WPF to go away, but neither will AJAX.
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Dec. 17, 2008 11:59 PM
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My hope is that when Flex developers talk about how great Apollo is, you also talk about what it can do for AJAX. Why is that? Well, because despite being an Adobe product, Apollo adoption won’t be driven by Flash initially. It will be driven by people who are making full use of AJAX and building very complex applications within the browser. By far the most powerful feature of Apollo is its ability to give AJAX developers a way to run their applications in a desktop environment. 
Adobe and Intel plan to collaborate on porting Adobe’s Flash widgetry to Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100, a way to put Flash-enhanced web content and rich Flash applications on television. The chip is bound for cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail-conne...
Adobe’s AIR for Linux, the runtime engine that supports rich Internet apps (RIAs), has caught up with its Windows and Mac siblings. The company has released AIR 1.5 for Linux, the first time the Linux desktop variant has made it as a production-grade, Adobe-supported release. And now...
