Adobe takes wraps off Apollo, uses WebKit

Adobe today took the wraps off their cross platform desktop application runtime called Apollo. The alpha is now available for download on Adobe labs.

What the heck does this 'runtime' do? It allows web developers to create desktop applications that run on both the Mac and PC using HTML, AJAX, and Flash. This is all well and good, I imagine you saying, but why the heck is this on TUAW? It would seem that Apollo is using WebKit as its HTML rendering engine. You might recall that WebKit is Apple's variant of the Konqueror HTML engine, which powers Safari and is baked right into OS X.

Adobe is using the open source version of WebKit, which is slightly different than the one found in OS X, but they plan on contributing code back to the project. This can only be good for Mac users. The more people that are using WebKit the more pressure companies will feel to support it (I'm looking at you, banks!).

[via Daring Fireball]

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Source: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:developerfaq#Wha…

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Adobe today took the wraps off their cross platform desktop application runtime called Apollo. The alpha is now available for download on...

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CocoaCup

The example apps are pretty cool.

If Adobe works on the delivery device for the install and apps, I think it could be great.

Every app should work on every platform.

c.

March 20 2007 at 7:48 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Carl Caum

This is great news for Linux too. As noted in the article, KDE created KHTML which is what WebKit was created from. Now KDE is going to offer WebKit to work with Konqueror for KDE4. With all these companies and projects using WebKit, it's on its way to becoming an industry standard. Plus, Adobe makes an effort to make its software work on Linux, so I'm fairly excited about this. To answer a previous post, Gecko is difficult to work with and is very slow and bulky. WebKit and KHTML are very fast and only around half a million lines of code. I think Gecko is around 1.6 million lines of code. So WebKit is the obvious choice.

March 20 2007 at 1:50 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Simon Arch

This won't be seeing the inside of my computer anytime soon. What's to stop people from using this as an adware or spyware vehicle?

March 19 2007 at 11:52 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Chris Bell

slightly different thAn...

March 19 2007 at 9:48 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Kuswanto

This is what i called good news :-)

Why Adobe does not used Gecko engine...?
That question now ringing on my head.

March 19 2007 at 9:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply