Well, I got a comment on my last RIA post and saw the news on techcrunch that the RIA platform space just got a little more crowdedAppcelerator Titanium is an open source platform for building rich desktop applications using web technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript as well as Flash and Silverlight.
Titanium apps can be built using the Appcelerator SDK – our open web platform, or you can use any third-party Ajax library or framework. We want to make sure you are able to realize the benefits of Titanium without being locked into a particular web framework.
I’ve been toying with it for a little bit today. Pretty easy SDK and very slick default app to show you around.
Pros:
- Works on Windows and Mac, both dev tools and deployment
- No special IDE or language requirements
- Slick integration with OS
- No downloads other than the final application for users
- Good documentation
Cons:
- It’s not going to provide you an easier way of doing really integrated desktop apps
- No 3d libraries or capabilities (though you can extend the platform yourself)
- The name is pretty bland and doesn’t really provide much insight into what it is
- Confusing (to me) on whether I should use Titanium or their other product Appcelerator
And continuing my earlier argument, I just don’t know yet whether these RIA platforms are worth farting around in too much for bigger development projects. If you’ve got a real app to build, you’re going to need to use Objective C, Java, .NET or C/C++ and the harder core IDEs like XCode, VisualStudio, Eclipse.
The more I toy with this stuff the more I think it’s going to be stuck in widget making land, simple games, and website extensions.
Then again, who knows where it all goes…
thanks for the mention. titanium PR1 is just the initial release and we have a long roadmap for it.
we purposely wanted to build titanium to be distinctly separate from our web sdk to ensure the community under that it was open and would easily work with other great frameworks and product out there. of course, it will work well with our web sdk and we hope developers will find that beneficial, too!
coming up with a name these days is quite impossible. 🙂
this is a community effort and we take working with our community serious. if you have suggestions or would like to help, let us know.
Jeff
Jeff,
Thanks for really being open.
Ok, thanks for the clarification on the difference between the two.
Yeah, I agree on names. Might want to stick something about RIA in it so it’s clear. maybe.
I think you could whip up a basic GUI for configuring apps. (I know, I should probably do it). I think a big user base for this could be the interactive designers who sit between Dev and Design – they are comfortable with Javascript and Actionscript and the Adobe toolset (mostly visual) but they see command line and they run away. Again, I should probably just whip something up…
Also, if you can add an api for common Sharing tools, you might get big pick up like we’ve seen with clearspring, gigya and sprout….
more to come….
good release overall.
lots better than JavaFX… to me that is.
oh, and open source IS a big deal.
so I asked in my other thread about how you see this project as different than OpenLazlo…