Adobe on Apollo Compeitors
Very interesting post by Andrew Shebanow (senior computer scientist at Adobe), reflecting on some of the reactions and comments he's heard since Apollo went alpha, including comparisons made with other offerings (Microsoft's WPF, Dekoh, Joyent Slingshot + magnetk, Yahoo! Widgets and Firefox 3.
Highlights for me are:
On WPF:
"Apollo competes with WPF - this meme is attractive to journalists because its easy to write a sexy story about a war between two large companies....Apollo’s can succeed even if WPF proves to be extremely popular, and vice versa.
On comments that Apollo is closed source and proprietary:
"Its true that a number of the pieces that make up Apollo are closed source, but how important this is will vary from developer to developer, and the story around Apollo alternatives is generally even worse."
On Dekoh:
"one thing that they have revealed is that the product relies on a centralized “Dekoh Network Service” for identity, sharing, and so on. The bottom line is that with Dekoh, you are making your application dependent on a closed source, propietary Dekoh service that will own and leverage information about your users and their data."
On Joyent Slingshot + magnetk:
"Downsides are a lot of potential security issues (no sandbox?)...More disturbing, though, is that it sounds like Joyent will be charging a royalty for distributing applications based on their runtime unless you are a customer for their hosting service...much less open than the Apollo model where the SDK and runtime are both free of charge."
On Yahoo! Widgets:
"I don’t really get the comparison, but even if you do think they serve similar needs, the fact is that Yahoo! Widgets is just as closed source and proprietary as Apollo, if not moreso"
And Firefox 3:
"its still fundamentally a web browser and it is nothing but vaporware at the moment."
The comments conversation to Andrew's post make enlightening reading too - I'd also be interested in hearing his thoughts on the Dojo Toolkit / dojo.storage.