cam macrae - blog

Pre-ramble.

I'm a great believer in the 10 minute test. That is, a given piece of technology has 10 minutes to make an impact - any sort of impact - or trigger some sort of emotional response. After about 10 minutes the marketability of the project/application/framework/whatever diminishes in proportion to my desire to see my problem solved.

It's very much a case of who came to who; if you want me to adopt your stuff, make it good, however if I've sought you out to solve an issue I'll probably persist a little longer.

Apollo

Apollo, an alpha, surpassed my expectations.

The runtime is packaged for Mac, so install is point and click. In stalling the Apollo SDK is as simple as unzipping the archive, although there is a disk image you have to mount and drag the files into the SDK runtime directory.

Because I was working along with the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide, I also made sure my install of the Flex SDK was up to date; likewise a matter of unzipping the archive and adding the bin directory to PATH.

Hello World!

Cut and paste the Hello World! example from the eBook, and you can have the your first Apollo app running in just a few minutes. Project structure isn't much different from your flex projects, but Apollo doesn't just limit you to flex, but uses the Webkit engine to provide support for run of the mill HTML/Javascript applications too.

Warts

Getting the trival Hello World! app runinng in the runtime was easy. Getting it packaged was hard. It seems the parser is very unforgiving:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/apollo/application/1.0.M3"
appId="com.oreilly.apollo.gettingStarted.HelloWorld" version="1.0">
     <properties>
       <name>HelloWorld</name>
       <publisher>test</publisher>
       <description>A sample Apollo application.
       </description>
       <copyright>(C) 2007 Your name. All rights reserved.
     </copyright>
     </properties>
     <rootContent systemChrome="standard" 
   transparent="false">
      HelloWorld.swf
     </rootContent>
   </application>

Results in an ugly packaging error:

null

Truly informative! However, this:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/apollo/application/1.0.M3"
appId="com.oreilly.apollo.gettingStarted.HelloWorld" version="1.0">
     <properties>
       <name>HelloWorld</name>
       <publisher>test</publisher>
       <description>A sample Apollo application.
       </description>
       <copyright>(C) 2007 Your name. All rights reserved.
     </copyright>
     </properties>
     <rootContent systemChrome="standard" transparent="false">HelloWorld.swf</rootContent>
   </application>

fixed the problem right away. It is an alpha!

All up, the future for rich internet applications looks pretty bright. I can't wait to port something serious to Apollo.