Dojo Offline - Running Web application Offline!

Ok! There is yet another beta product that you can add to the list of Apollo,Silverlight and Dekoh. This time the beta product is from Dojo an ajax library. According to Dojo team the Dojo Offline is "a free, open source toolkit that makes it easy for web applications to work offline" . Yes, this has striking similarities with Apollo, Silverlight and Dekoh (Read my previous post for comparison) as all these beta products aims at "Integrating web with desktop"! and all these products define it in their own way.

Dojo Offline have been in development from some time during Jan 2007 or even before that. It has been developed by Dojo, SitePen and Brad Neuberg, a San Francisco-based software architect and programmer. Dojo Offline claims to the small,easy and open. It consist of two parts : a javascript library (the dojo library) with web pages and a cross-platform, cross-browser runtime that will help to cache the web application interface and run. The small caching is done by polipo a caching web proxy developed by Juliusz Chroboczek. This small runtime is only 300K (compared to its competitors this is very small). It also comes with tools to build UI, helps to store data and important part - its 100% open source! and the runtime is BSD licensed.

The runtime is available for download for developers. For end users only the windows and Mac OS X. You can have a look at Hello World application here.

Ubuntu brings Java to users

Ubuntu has been steadily climbing to become one of the best Linux distros available. this community built Linux have become one of the stable and user-friendly OS available. The installation process is simple compared to other linux distros and with each new release, Ubuntu have come a long way in building desktop version of linux (They also have server versions).

The new release, Ubuntu 7.04 is going to offer a "java combo". The combo will contain Sun's J2EE with GlassFish, JDK 6, Derby based java DB and NetBeans IDE 5.5. This offer comes after Sun Microsystem partnered with Canonical Ltd, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu. The combo will be available for download from the Ubuntu repository.

The main aim of this move is to catch up with the RedHat/Jboss which is already available. The Sun's choice to pick Ubuntu is really good because, Ubuntu have been growing fast. The main reason for this growth is its free online support, free CD distributions, forums along side the commercial support. Apart from this they have done a good work to bring out a very user-friendly desktop OS!

So with Sun and Ubuntu providing this new combo, lets see how the other rivals compete.

Adobe unveils its media player

Abode is keep their camp rolling! They just unveiled their new product ( the Adobe Media Player ) at National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show. NAB seem to be a happening place with Microsoft launching its Silverlight. The battle is on!

Adobe's Media player seems to be developed in Apollo and will be one of the first Apollo application from Adobe. The player's name is Philo and its download will be available only by mid 2007. It's going to support the Flash format playback for which there is no player from Adobe. It will have both online and offline playback with capabilities for demand streaming, live streaming, progressive download and protected download-and-play.

I am sure, they will provide a excellent user-friendly user interface and will have capabilities to share the media content and will have support for open standards like RSS and SMIL.

Microsoft launches Silverlight

At last Microsoft moves WPF/E to Silverlight! This shows Microsoft is not far from Abode's Apollo and Pramatic's Dekoh in the race of building cross-browser and cross-platform for developing rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. All these three products are in race head to head and I recommend you (web developers) keep a close look on these technology because these are going to transform the web! Even though all these (including Silverlight) are in their pre-release and is meant for developers to test they are brilliant and highly innovative work from these companies.

Now looking into Silverlight, the first change here is Microsoft gave WPF/E (the project codename) to Silverlight and display it as a development procduct rather than keeping it in MSDN. And this is the only major change I can see!!! They have given it a name, site and yah, its more publicly accessible.

Microsoft's definition of Silverlight is :"Microsoft Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web". But I am still wondering will they support linux this time around and provide the runtime? Or will the mono project develop the runtime as they developed the .Net counter part for linux?

Dekoh Alpha Released!

Pramati Technologies just announced the public alpha release of their new RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform, Dekoh Desktop. Dekoh has already challenged Apollo as Desktop/Web Platform and now they are giving their Alpha to public. This is a great opportunity for web developers to test both Dekoh and Apollo at their alpha stage and find their likes and dislikes. And finally reduce the desktop - web gap!

Looking at the Dekoh architecture, it consist of there parts:

1. Dekoh Desktop: the developer platform; the core runtime engine that runs on Windows, Linux or Mac OS. This consist of a personal web server and runtime (You will be needing JDK 1.5).

2. Dekoh Applications: the initial set of applications that can make the platform sufficiently interesting for end users to install and try. They have come up with some interesting applications for the developers and users to try and have a feel. Some of these are : Thumbnail Maker , TagCloud.

3. Dekoh Network: the sharing platform for end users to create personal networks in the typical web2.0 style right on their desktop. It also ensures secured and controlled sharing of applications or content on the desktop.

Dekoh developers can find their development portal here and the wiki home is a good start for the starters. But there are still pages that say "comming soon"!!!