Appcelerator Launches Titanium: AIR for the Open Web
Today, Appcelerator, a Mountain View-based company that focuses on open source technologies for building rich web applications, announced the first public release of its Titanium platform. The closest analogue to Titanium is probably Adobe AIR. Titanium allows developers to create platform independent, web enabled desktop and mobile applications. The Titanium platform is currently available for Windows and Mac, but a Linux version should be available in January 2009.
Titanium is built on top of a number of open source projects, including WebKit, Gears, and Chromium. Some of the most important features of the platform include direct file system access, built-in database support, native windowing, desktop notifications, geo-location, and a plugin architecture for easily extending the platform.
Demo Apps
We tested some of the demo applications that Appcelerator has created, and both the Twitter app and the 'Playtanium' desktop YouTube player worked just as advertised and felt as speedy as you would expect from a native application. Being demos, the apps were obviously not very feature rich, but clearly show the potential of the platform.
Money
Appcelerator also announced a $4.1 million Series A funding round, which should put the development of this platform on safe footing for the foreseeable future.
Bridging the Gap Between Web and Desktop
According to Jeff Haynie, Appcelerator's CEO, Titanium is meant to provide an open source alternative to other, proprietary platforms with similar feature sets. It is good to see more innovation in this space, which until now was more or less dominated by proprietary platforms.
The question, of course, will be if developers will adopt the platform for their own projects (looking at the documentation, it would seem that any Ruby programmer should be able to get a Titanium project up and running in no time). Appcelerator is definitely doing its part to help developers by providing them with ample documentation for the Titanium SDK.
Overview of two Titanium Demo Apps from jeff haynie on Vimeo.
Comments
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The problem with these new platforms, no matter how wonderful they are, is adoption.
AIR has a huge advantage in that it is bundled with the most popular add-in ever.
While savvy netizens may be able to run Titanium apps, novices will be scared off. And the corporate audience may not be able to install the platform at all, whereas AIR is sneaked through Flash.
Already played with it a bit today. Having issues with the Ruby installation though. Getting "undefined method collect for #Gem::Version.........
Posted by: Stephan Miller
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December 9, 2008 10:15 AM
@Stephan
Are you running the installer for win32? If so you might want to try re-downloading, we discovered a Gems version error early in the day and re-uploaded to fix the issue. Let us know if that solves your problem:
http://bit.ly/titanium
The advantage that this has over is, is that you dont have to install a Titanium runtime before being able to install the apps. Thats the one thing I dont like about AIR, you users have to install the AIR platform first. Plus, with this it will be much easier to use existing technologies, instead of a proprietary language such as flex.
@Rutter: What do you mean, "you dont have to install a Titanium runtime before being able to install the apps"? They are just packaging the of interest and the runtime together. If I'm not mistaken, they only plan to do this for a time, until they have enough users.
If adobe did this, people (eg. me) would complain. My understanding is that adobe has been considering bundling AIR with flash or acrobat. We'll see, I'm always up for competition and JavaFX seems surprisingly still in the game, imo.
the app of interest*
I wonder what languages apart from Ruby this new open source platform will support.
I've been following Appcelerator for a long time and at least on the surface, Titanium looks great.
But it will come down to buy-in from developers. Someone needs to do some side-by-side comparisons with AIR apps, in terms of stability, speed, development ease/speed, etc.
Let's see how far Jeff and team can make the funding go... but two thumbs up for "balls" and creativity, thus far.
Impressed.
-Alister