Apollo

For those of you that have been following my blog since the beginning, you'll remember when I was going to build something using Flash (via OpenLaszlo) as my front-end. I later switched to the Ruby on Rails platform, and decided on XHTML & JavaScript for my front-end.

I really liked the possibilities OpenLaszlo provided, but that particular technology (at the time) wasn't quite where I wanted it to be to build an app with. Macromedia (Now Adobe) came out with their Flex product (which some would say was a rip-off of Laszlo), and it's been steadily gaining in popularity. I see more and more mention of it these days then when it was first released. (The first version cost $12,000 - the 2nd has a free SDK!)

Adobe has finally made available to the public their Apollo project (in alpha form). From what I can tell Apollo acts as a bridge between XHTML/JavaScript, Flash/Flex, and your desktop. I saw this video of a guy using Apollo to make a mash-up app of his local address book and Google Maps. I totally freaked out and sent it to some friends. I was just amazed that we can finally start deeply integrating with desktop data!

I really think Apollo is going to be an amazing technology when the entire development community starts hacking on this thing.

Think of all the file-uploading web apps out there (like Pudding). If the web-app can reach out to your desktop, imagine the possibilities!

This is all the more reason to bust my ass this week to get the Pudding beta up and running so I can start experimenting with these new technologies to see what would make sense for the next version of Pudding. I've already got some ideas, and Apollo just gave me some more!