This evening i took the second look into Adobe Apollo. This time around i found a lot of docs and examples so i got pretty fast stuck and fascinated.
An Apollo program consist of javascript 1.7 / html / Actionscript 3.0 / Apollo application xml. You have a pretty free application file structure and your app can hold as many of the above mentioned files as you need.
Your whole sourcecode pile is compiled into a solid *.air file. The compilation + debugging can be made in the free command line tools or with the Flex Builder / Eclipse Plugin + the Apollo Plugin. The resulting solid file is installed on any OS that has the free apollo runtime installed.
(Picture from Apollo Wiki)
I focused my first tests on the usage as a wrapper for existing html/Javascript applications. The Apollo runtime supports javascript, so i did not really need to know Actionscript details to get started.
I recently coded the Twitter King UWA Widget and thought embedding it into such a shell of *.air, could really be damn useful. Well one might think “why do i have browser?” but Apollo provides you with some neat extra features concerning:
- CRUD access to the local file system
- Update tools
- shell access
- window controls
- talking between javascript / flash
- remote request methods
It should also be possible to include some of our favorite javascript script frameworks (only got jQuery 
) and with the power of dom + js + AS you can really rock. Grab remote data, juggle with local files and offline caches, embed dynamic html or flash .. simply everything an application needs.
To quote Adobe:
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.
We will have to see how fast this engine is spreading. It has not yet made it onto the adobe homepage but i think its worth to spend another long night on.
Tomorrow i will attend the adobe live conference in cologne which has two talks about Apollo.