Why Apollo?
I normally don’t like to do those "me too" sorts of posts Microsoft folks seem to specialize in, where you just say "look at this great article my coworker wrote". To me, its always seemed like a rather distasteful way to do PageRank/TechMeme manipulation. But Mike Chambers has written a really good article on the rationale behind Apollo, so here I go emulating bad behavior…
While I’m passing on Apollo links, here are a couple of shorter articles I also liked:
- Richard McManus and John Milan argue about online desktop apps vs. offline web apps. I don’t really agree with either side, but its a good read.
- Pasz.com has an article on things to like about Apollo from a day-to-day development point of view.
Shebanator 
Question is what motivated him to write it? 🙂
My only real beef with Adobe around Apollo is simply sort out the messaging so the developers don’t spend all this nice energy and passion spinning applications up, only to have some stupid news article from x source devaluing it.
Kind of like what happen with FLEX in it’s initial maiden voyage.
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Scott Barnes
Evangelist
Microsoft – I made a ball move in WPF/e from an event in Apollo, i have no idea why that is good.
[Andrew says] Keep on trollin, Scott.
Thank you for the link.
One does have to ask what the purpose of this entry was though. Was it to provide information that you thought would be useful to the community, or was it to bash the way MS people blog?
[Andrew says] My purpose was more the former than the latter. I don’t like blog posts that don’t add value and feared I was heading in that direction with this post – so it was really intended more as apologizing for the lack of meaning in the post than as an attack on Microsoft. Rereading, though, it does come off more like a rant. Sorry about that.
Love your work Andrew 🙂
(We may differ on opinions etc, but i wouldn’t apologise for the post, it was you speaking your mind – which is good right?)
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Scott Barnes
Trollin Evangelit
Microsoft
I have a lot of time invested in Java, but it’s still a big download, and they don’t release for Mac. (Apple does that years later.) Mozilla’s still slow and doesn’t have enough features. Flash/Apollo is still slow to release for Linux, and it’s not open source.
The fragmentation argument is silly for Java, and Sun finally realized that. Java going (not gone yet) open source is great news.
So I’m in the Java camp, but I’ll watch out for Firefox 4.0 (or whenever they finally get Tamarin into the core along with hardware acceleration, 3D, and Ogg).
Or if Adobe would/could open source Flash/Apollo, I would say goodbye to Java. Flash beats Java on the metrics that count by a large margin. Then again, with Java open source, maybe it will get easier to shrink down (and maybe even get a Mac port).
So who reaches the finish line of a lean, cross-platform, open source rich client first? Who wants the mind share? I’ll stick with Java and Swing for now.