It’s certainly nothing new, we’ve been trying to develop web apps that have the power of native desktop apps for a decade or more. Going back to Applets, ActiveX, Flash, Ajax, they’re all just trying to provide system capabilities to a tied down web browser. AIR was, in my opinion, the first runtime to get the mix right. There were SSBs before it, and before that even some HTML-embedding cross-browser runtimes like XULRunner, Qt, and others. The crucial part, as I see it, is positioning and developer tools. Adobe has done a great job really building out their suite of Runtime + Tools.. They have command line driven development, Dreamweaver, Eclipse/Flex Builder, Flash, and more. Building apps in HTML/CSS/Javascript is such a compelling use case, because practically every coder on the planet has written a web page/app.

So where does Titanium fit? We’re certainly following in the footsteps of giants — Adobe deserves a lot of credit for being innovators in this field, their product has really set the bar high. We feel though, that there is a fundamental gap in the way that people develop and use technologies. Adobe has always been, and probably always will be, a proprietary software company. Their main products (Flash, AIR, Photoshop etc etc) are all tightly closed. I don’t want to detract from some of the major open source things they have done (Flex, Tamarind), but culturally they are a different company than Appcelerator. Our goal is to embrace openness and community for all the potential it can bring to this platform. Not only will the entire source base of our runtime be available, but we will only be utilizing open source projects (Webkit, Chrome, etc), and we will have a plugin architecture (and of course NPAPI) to allow things that aren’t possible to day in Adobe AIR.. think of the possibilites: integration with your favorite language, Silverlight and Java plugins, or custom native plugins for your own business requirements! These things are simply not possible in AIR. We also plan to have an open distribution model — You can distribute the app in either pre-bundled or no-runtime modes. There’s no licensing or hoops to jump through, we’re licensed under the ASL2, so you’re free to use it however you see fit.

It may not actually “be” the post-browser web (not yet anyway), but I think AIR, and now Titanium are ushering in a new suite of apps that, at the very least, blur the lines between desktop and browser even more. A great article was written today by Keeto, a frustrated AIR developer who has now crowned himself the Titanium Preacher: , http://keetology.tumblr.com/post/64094665/titanium-an-early-look-at-the-future-of-the-pbw.

It looks like our message is resonating.. the way forward is the open web.