Today Adobe is holding an event called Engage, where it is explaining its Apollo web development platform for tech bloggers, developers and others in the Web industry. John Dowdell from Adobe has a useful page of links. The coverage is quite diverse, from Tim O’Reilly commenting on the user experience aspects, to David Berlind on Brightcove, to James Governor on Acesis, to Scoble on positioning, to Ryan Stewart’s blanket coverage.
But let’s step back and look at the high level. Michael Coté from Redmonk sums it up well:
“Apollo itself is, to be blunt, a new GUI framework evolved from Flash, Flex, ActionScript, and lots of XML. The idea is “bringing the web to the desktop”…”
Really, to put it even more bluntly, Apollo is Adobe’s Web platform – only its plays to Adobe’s strengths, which is “rich” desktop apps. And in particular, Adobe has two killer assets which it wants to push forward in this new world of desktop/web integration: Flash and PDF (Portable Document Format). David Berlind reported some interesting stats around those two things:
- Between Flash Player and PDF, the company’s reach extends into over 700 million PCs and 150 million devices
- The Flash Player 8 upgrade reached 85 percent market penetration in 9 months. Lynch claimed this to be the fastest update of any client technology in the world.
- There are already 250,000,000 PDF-formatted documents on the Web.
The buzzword for all this is Rich Internet Applications (RIA). As Ryan Stewart nicely laid out in a previous post, Apollo will compete with other RIA platforms – OpenLaszlo, Microsoft’s WPF/E and WPF platforms, and of course Ajax itself (the rich internet app weapon of choice for Google). There’s also another one, which Ryan didn’t mention, that I will be posting on later today 😉
- 1st half of this year: Apollo public labs release, Flex “Moxie” (possibly Flex 3) public labs release, Creative Suite 3.
- Second half: Apollo 1.0, Flex “Moxie”, “Phillo” 1.0 (Internet TV), Flash Media Server.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)