Apollo helps Adobe compete with Ajax
Published: 23 Mar 2007 09:55 GMT
…adopting development tools and browser plug-ins from a single vendor such as Adobe or Microsoft.
However, "there are still a lot of problems with browser compatibilities with Firefox and [Microsoft's] Internet Explorer," Monson-Haefel said.
The strengths of different development tools may go a long way to determining the relative popularity of Ajax or other browser plug-in technologies.
OpenLaszlo, for example, is an open-source development tool designed to build Flash or Ajax-style rich internet applications.
Another is Nexaweb, which has built an Eclipse-based Ajax tool. And there are several Ajax frameworks to speed development. Adobe's Flex allows developers to combine HTML, JavaScript and Flash in a single application.
Monson-Haefel said that Ajax has significant vendor support and has captured the most "mind share" of web developers. Java, although the most mature, suffers from people's poor experiences with applets which ran in browsers when Java first came out in the 1990s, he said.
"It's going to be fun and interesting to see where Ajax will go because people keep pushing the envelope," he said. "We're seeing a lot of people experiment, so we haven't see the full potential of Ajax."
Meanwhile, the newest entrants into the rich internet applications race — Microsoft's WPF/E and Apollo — will require end users to download a new browser plug-in to run applications.
Developers can take advantage of the offline capabilities of Apollo to do things such as notify people working on a shared document that an update has been done, Treitman noted.
"It's got a lot of potential. We have to see how users react to it," he said.
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