Adobe Apollo is in alpha

Though there are some people who are concerned about handing over a monopoly to Adobe (which is a fair concern), Adobe Apollo is now out in alpha and is certainly technology to watch. It’s a system for creating cross-platform desktop apps using webesque technologies (HTML/JavaScript/CSS/Flash). Unfortunately, cross-platform at this time only means Windows and Mac, though Apollo could undoubtedly be brought to Linux if the demand is there.

I heard a rumor at one point that Adobe is considering bundling in sqlite, which I think would be killer. Looking at the FAQ, it would appear that sqlite is still on the table but is not in this release. It seems like having sqlite as a local data store is a no brainer… having to come up with your own formats for all offline data you want to store seems like a drag. At least, it would be for any moderately sizeable amount of data.