I’ve been looking at Apollo, Adobe’s new technology for the development and deployment of Rich Internet Applications, and I can say I’m pretty excited about the possibilities - and honestly, it’s good to see Adobe isn’t screwing up with Apollo as much as with the Creative Suite icons (which I talked about yesterday).

According to the people at Adobe themselves on their wiki, “Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s”.

There’s already a few companies working on Apollo based applications, bringing the connectivity of the web and the richness of the desktop together. One of such companies is eBay, who’s working on a client for their service using Apollo (read about it here). We’ll most likely think about doing something similar for some of our own projects.

Fact is, RIAs are going to be all the rage next year, and Adobe seems to be pushing things in the right direction with this innitiative. I guess we’ll see just how much when I can get my hands on it, but I have grown high expectations since I built a client for Goplan’s ticket management system in under one hour using our API and Adobe’s Flex - oh, if only Flex Builder wasn’t that expensive.

Some Apollo resources

Looking around for some information on the technology, I found a few good resources. First, a video with Christian Cantrell of Adobe, demonstrating what Apollo is, and showing some of the applications built with it. There’s also a breeze demo with Luis Polanco and Mike Chambers that provides some background information on the platform.

And finally, Mike did a podcast with Kevin Lynch over at Talkcrunch that highlights the new capabilities Apollo brings to RIA developers, as well as some background information as to where Adobe wants to go with the Apollo effort.