This morning, Mountain View-based startup Appcelerator is taking the wraps off its second Preview Release for Titanium, an open-source developer platform meant to compete with Adobe AIR and the likes for building rich internet, mobile and desktop applications.
Titanium PR2 comes with a number of new features that are worth taking a look at, like an extensible Module API and built-in support for Linux and a wide range of programming languages like Python, Ruby and JavaScript in addition to C++. More technical details are outlined on the company blog Appcelerant.
The new release of the open developer platform, licensed under Apache Public License (version 2), can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OSX or Linux here. The release also includes a nifty tool dubbed Titanium Developer which groups a number of social media and communication services like Twitter, FriendFeed and an IRC chat module which is supposed to make it easier for the open-source developer community to connect and collaborate when using Titanium for building apps. Check out this screencast to see how it works.
I have my doubts about Appcelerator being able to compete with more established players like Adobe with its cross-platform AIR runtime (at version 1.5.1 since yesterday), but it never hurts for developers to have alternatives, especially when they are open-source and as flexible as Titanium. The startup features a couple of demo applications you can play with, like Tweetanium (desktop Twitter client) and Playtanium (a desktop YouTube video player). I tested both (admittedly very basic) apps on my Windows Vista powered PC and they worked like a charm.
Appcelerator recently raised $4.1 million in a Series A round led by Storm Ventures.
Below are a couple of screenshots and a tutorial video on how to get started with Titanium. If you build an app with it, be sure to let us know!
Titanium Developer: Getting Started from Appcelerator Video Channel on Vimeo.
“I have my doubts about Appcelerator being able to compete with more established players like Adobe with its cross-platform AIR runtime”
Yes, but the key point here is that it is open source … so even if it doesn’t “win” in the marketplace, you do not find yourself stuck with a closed piece of software.
That is just one reason why open source is sexy.
or the reason why it is bound to fail.
Please explain? License paranoia?
Tweetanium is an Appcelerator Titanium application for Twitter..
open source is a winner because over time, people will see no reason why corporations should control key applications on the web.
http://cli.gs/Yqh6Gv
Name one open source key web application.
phpmyadmin?
hehe, i agree with what your implying though..
WordPress !
Definitely. See: TC et al.
Apache, Firefox, MediaWiki (Wikipedia), lighttpd, etc. etc.
None of those are “key” as in, there is a major dependency on them. All great apps, but they’re not the only ones in their respective categories.
Applications that are open source can be really good, but unfortunately the term is way overhyped and given too lofty of a status. Things need to just work and if a private company makes something great there is nothing wrong with that.
The open source model struggles to compete with proprietary because our current system has many protections for the proprietary model. Thus, they allow closed source to thrive because they can enforce their ridiculous licenses on the consumer.
However the internet would not be what it is today if it were not for open source. FOSS has allowed users to have blogs (wordpress), CMS (drupal, Joomla), e-commerce (Magento, Ubercart, Virtuemart, osCommerce), CRMs (SugarCRM, vTiger), Project Tracking systems (Trac, RedMine), Forums (PHPBB, Punbb, SMF) and the ability to MODIFY these systems. It has allowed for more affordable web hosting through LAMP (all open source technologies).
If the Internet was all closed, it would suck. Only big companies would be able to participate, and the rest of us would be consumers unable to pay the entry fee.
Firefox!
So worst case scenario for Adobe is to open AIR… At least it seems to me.
Why is PHP always left out, dang.
PHP is coming very soon (before beta).
cool
just great
Any feedback on the chat feature?
We’ve surfaced the photos, videos, and tweets for 140 software platforms at http://sw.tEarn.com/. Surprising how many platforms are moving toward video support. Also, the volume of realtime tweets by platform.
Let us know your success stories with realtime, collaborative software debugging.
This will fail… how are you supposed to get your customers to install the basic package to use it?
The way I understood it is that the developer can choose to develop something that requires the user to install something, or not.
for real?, that’s deep….
good article
@Darren as robin said you don’t have to distribute requiring a pre-installed anything. in the way, nothing different than any normal app.
Developing cross platform desktop applications is not easy. The choices usually were C/C++, Java, and .NET.
C/C++ requires longer time but ends up with a neat app. .NET is not really cross-platform (mono for desktop will never work). And Java got many problems for desktop apps, starting with the GUI toolkits available, and ending with the most basic things.
I’m really excited about Adobe AIR as it is gaining momentum and even more excited to see other alternatives; specially open source ones.
Good luck for Appcelerator!
Anderson Mccutcheon, you’re trolling, right?
Looks similar to Google Gears, which is open source.
@Sekhar
Google gears has some similarities (and in fact, we made use of some Gears APIs in our first release), but the scope of the project is pretty limited when compared to Titanium.
Gears is mainly a browser plugin aimed at delivering some native functionality to Javascript — DB, Desktop, Workers, etc. You can basically consider Gears to be an early HTML5 implementation for browsers who aren’t up-to-snuff yet.
Titanium on the other hand is a desktop app platform that’s based on WebKit that delivers all of the APIs and services you would expect: Filesystem, Notifications, Menuing, Custom chromed windows, integration with popular languages (Javascript, Python, Ruby), Media, and others. On top of the APIs that we expose, Titanium is at it’s core a microkernel that exposes a pluggable module and binding system. This allows 3rd party developers to introduce their own functionality using C++, or any of the languages listed above. On top of that, we round out the platform with a development tool for interacting/testing/deploying your app, and we provide a redistributable runtime.
There is nothing wrong with Gears, but it’s scope is fairly limited to basic functionality in a “browser-only” world. Our approach breaks free of the browser, and uses open source and extensibility to hopefully provide a great web-tech based desktop platform.
Hope that helps =)
For apps that don’t require the user to install anything, what runtime do they use? Is Flash output supported?
Any runtime you want — you’re able to bundle any javascript or 3rd party libraries with your app at your discretion. In our Developer app you can choose between a number of popular JS frameworks pre-baked like jQuery, Mootools, YUI, etc. Flash, Silverlight, and pretty much any “native” browser widgets have all been demoed in Titanium apps, so there’s no reason you couldn’t write your Titanium App in Flex, for example
Oh sure, so now that’s -one- Open Source key web application, other than the corpus of W3C work and forked Adobe that isn’t key to the Darth Family’s Key Web Objectives…. No wait…the true key IETF/RFC standards are Free as in running-through-hospitals-with-live-firearms-is-Required. Add those beads to your socks, and then you can go out claiming an enforceable license.
I want to break Flash in the way Flash breaks clients; as in, problems-with-the-liquid-graphite-cooling broken. But this kind of runs things through a three-star banquet kitchen, and that’s OK. Go Appcelerator peeps!