Who are the Apollo Developers?

By admin on 03/01/2007

Just re-reading a post I made a short while back on Apollo, where I mentioned a split between desktop application developers and web applications developers and thought I'd go into a little more depth here.

I am of the understanding that the target audience for Apollo is web developers, this is quite an obvious one really as one of the major benefits of Apollo is the re-use of existing web-based skill sets (flash, flex, html, ajax etc). This is also reflected in the positioning of Apollo from a marketing perspective (flash conferences and web dev conferences/user groups).

This will undoubtedly lead to an influx of "Rich Internet Desktop Application Developers" (can I be the first to publish the acronyms RIDA and RIDADs? :P). However what perhaps isn't so planned for that I can foresee is the number of traditional "desktop application developers" coming out of the desktop woodwork to show these web devs the ins and outs of desktop application development. We went through a massive learning curve when we educated ourselves on developing applications for web. So much so that perhaps a certain amount of this education will need to be undone now we are venturing back to the desktop.

This is of course assuming there is any form of distinction between a desktop app developer and an internet application developer? Personally I would say I started out as a web developer, became a desktop application developer and now sit somewhere in between desktop and web application developer (when I have a developer hat on of any sort). I would certainly not be surprised if a number of web developers have never developed traditional desktop applications nor intended to that are now considering the shift to application development with the advent of Apollo.

My queries that we will see answered throughout 2007 and beyond are:

Might Apollo also lead to more traditional desktop application developers delving into web technologies to get their hands dirty with Apollo?

Will there be a clash of web app developers vs desktop app developers arguing over how things should be done on the desktop?

Will there be a new breed of application that is exploited through the leveraging of desktop and web apps on a single platform?