Richard MacManus on “Understanding Apollo”
Richard MacManus writes about Understanding Apollo.
[tease]
… Apollo aims to bring web apps to the desktop, in contrast to Microsoft’s WPF [Silverlight] which comes from the desktop to the Web (it’s worth noting though that Mike doesn’t believe Apollo competes with WPF).
He also told me that an oft-quoted benefit of Apollo, offline access for web apps, is not the main reason Adobe created Apollo. He said the main reason is to break out of the restrictions of the browser, with a richer UI.
Essentially Adobe is aiming to create a new type of runtime, one that allows end users to run web apps on the desktop – as an alternative or complement to the browser.
[tease]
So why create a new runtime, if the browser is ‘good enough’ for most web apps – including RIAs (most rich Ajax apps run very well in the browser)? Well the reason for Apollo’s existence is essentially to create a richer, more interactive environment for web apps.
To achieve this, Adobe has created a platform for web apps that in some cases is an alternative to the browser, in other cases complements it. This is because Apollo web apps run on the desktop, using the Apollo runtime. Note that developers can also deploy Ajax applications to the desktop via Apollo.
[tease]
Adobe is aiming for a much lighter ‘footprint’ on the desktop than previous runtimes – e.g. Sun’s Java runtime (popular on the Web in the 90′s) and Microsoft’s DotNet. A footprint is essentially how many megabytes you need to download to install a runtime on your desktop.
It’s important to remember that, as with any software running on your desktop, you need to install it onto your computer. With Java you need to download 12-13 MB, and with DotNet it requires a 50+ MB download.
… Adobe is aiming for a footprint of around 6 MB, significantly lower than its two competitors. He also said that Apollo won’t have problems with conflicting versions of the runtime, which has been an issue for Java in the past.