Louisville’s Greg Ferrell on Titanium App

Greg Ferrell is a friend of mine and has an excellent grasp of current trends and techniques with JavaScript. He is recently featured on the Yahoo! Developer Network Blog for his article on Titanium by Jeff Haynie of Appcelerator vs. Adobe AIR for development. This is a good read on his revelations at Jsconf2009 (April 24-25, 2009). For those of you that aren’t familiar with Greg check out his article and read his blog at studiokoi.com.

“...Titanium, it is an open-source, cross-platform, desktop application SDK that is built on Webkit and applications are written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript and supports lots of HTML5 goodies. (It also supports writing in Python and Ruby, with plans to add more languages in the future.). If that sounds a lot like Adobe AIR, that’s because it is. However, there are some fundamental differences that make Titanium a viable choice and very desirable over other solutions.”

For my students: Why is this important to you?

What is Appcelerator Titanium any way?

Well Bob Walsh of CNET puts it well:

    “Titanium apps are more than web apps running in snapped-off web pages such as with Google Chrome; they’re full blown first class desktop apps with desktop app goodies like direct file system access, local database storage, desktop notifications-prerogatives that traditional desktop developers take for granted but Web devs usually have to do without.”

Okay, so what is Adobe AIR?
From the Wikipedia article:

    “Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML, or Ajax, that can be deployed as a desktop application.”

There are a ton of resources online so there is no need to re-invent the wheel here but it will be worth your time to browse the links in this article so that when these things come up in conversation you will now what it is that someone is talking about and possibly apply some of these resources to your own work as you develop into full-grown technology creatures.

In a nut-shell:

A Rich Internet Application, which these tools will allow you to create, is a desktop application that integrates with the web. Greg uses them automate workflow process such as gathering XML information and outputting it into different formats and integrating that workflow with the web. This kind of development will make your life much easier.

Greg Ferrell is the author of the studiokoi blog and is a developer for Northrop Grumman producing distance learning courseware for the military at his office by Fort Knox.