Adobe, Apollo, eBay and effectiveUI in InfoWorld
A great article appeared in InfoWorld and PC World last week discussing the eBay desktop application effectiveUI is building on the Apollo platform. Sean and I were interviewed by Elizabeth Montalbano, from IDG. She was an interesting reporter, very “matter of fact”. She conceived the story, called for interviews, interviewed, wrote the article and published it in less than a day!
Some of the things she missed in the article was Apollo’s ability to access the file system and display system notifications. The article mentions “offline” capabilities a bit, but I think it does not do it justice. The ability to allow users to disconnect from the internet and still interact with an “online” application is the feature that gets our customers most excited about the Apollo platform.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/03/01/HNadobeapollobeta_1.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,129517-c,webservices/article.html
Anthony's Blog 
For me and some other people (J.Duhl), a Rich Internet Application is a Web application that allows:
Interaction: Triggering of actions from the UI to obtain response expe-riences
Multimedia: Media (text, graphics, audio, video and animations) and live media support
Multi-device: Independence from the client rendering platform
Unlimited widgets: Possibility of building new widgets, if necessary
Visual continuity: Avoiding of page refresh
Synchronization: Specification of temporal relationships among the UI elements
N-Layers development: Separation of system development in multiple layers
Dynamic data retrieval: Specification of time or event-triggered processes to send/receive information from the server asynchronously
Parallel requests to diverse sources: Recovering of data from one or more sources at the same time asynchronously
Personalisation: Possibility of adapting to globalisation (internationalisation and localisation), accessibility, etc.
Interactive collaboration: Expression of inherent interactive Web collaboration in “real time” (synchronization of clients)
No installation at the client-side: Possibility of running the application online, i.e., avoiding the installation at client, or offline
Apollo, the same as Java Web Start, break the last point.
I am sure that from the Entrerprise point of view it’s easier to argue against Apollo than against Java.
If Apollo overrides Flex/Flash will be the end for flashplayer-based applications.
That’s great news Anthony! Very cool.
mlinaje,
You have clearly done a good job defining what an RIA is… I also like the wikipedia definition of RIAs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application
I also agree that having to install a runtime to use an RIA defeats the purpose. However, I don’t think Adobe is looking to replace the Flash player for Internet application deployment. In my opinion, they are looking to help RIA developers bring their skills to the desktop, and allow a way to leverage the excellent Flex UI framework to build better applications that happen to have online capabilities (should you decide to take advantage those online capabilities). i look at Apollo a little differently… it is a desktop development platform that we can use our existing web development skills to create. We can create a Flex (or HTML for that matter) application that is used entirely offline. We also can create “connected” or “occasionally connected” apps that give us the ability to communicate with a web hosted service…
I also believe that there are more then just a few Java developers who are a little frustrated with the GUI development tools they have. Bruce Eckel wrote an excellent article on the subject:
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=193593
In any case, I appreciate you commenting on my post, please continue to do so!
Anthony
wooooooooo
All sounds great, will have to read again to understand.
You obviously put a lot of effort in research and I take my hat of to you.
cheers
Paul
hey
nice post
i like your blog
and the news is kool:)
thanks for sharing such good information with us:)