techno.blog("Dion")

Adobe Apollo is a pretty bold move.

If it is successful it could be a dominant platform of the future, and the timing might be spot on for Adobe.

“Imagine a cross platform developer toolkit. You can write your application once and run it everywhere”

Sound familiar? Swing (AWT) promised this. One app that you can deploy on Windows, Linux, Mac, and probably the fridge in years to come.

Unfortunately its birth was scrappy. The API was difficult, it looked like crap, and it performed like a dog.

My old mate Ben has made a healthy living being one of the very few who is, and can make your team, productive with Swing.

As the years have gone by Swing has actually gotten half decent. We would still love Swing to have a killer look and feel, and there still needs to be a framework to make it more productive, but we are getting there.

Then along comes Adobe with Apollo. The confluence is compelling:

• A lot of developers know Flash
• A lot of developers are doing Ajax (HTML/CSS/JS)
• The latest Flash VM is a JIT and is very performant
• Their is a blurring between online and offline applications

Imagine if you could develop in kinda one model (JS, HTML, CSS) and deploy to the web, AND rich desktop applications. Apollo is poised to do this for you, and it has the nice cross platform benefits of Swing too.

We linked to a presentation given by Adobe at their MAX conference on ajaxian: Leveraging HTML/JavaScript and Ajax in Apollo Applications.

If they can pull it off, we could have something special. On, and Flash has a mobile story too.