Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney

Appcelerator launching open source AIR competitor

By | December 9, 2008, 6:24am PST

Summary: We are working on a set of products running in the cloud, monetized through application life cycle products that live in the cloud, all very additive to development.

Titanium logoAppcelerator has launched an open source competitor to Adobe’s AIR, called Titanium, aimed at helping developers build Web technology into desktop applications.

Appcelerator has also brought in new capital and begun collaborating with SpringSource as it continues to make progress following a move from Atlanta to Mountain View earlier this year.

I caught up with CEO Jeff Hainey Haynie yesterday, who said “we were able to do more in a day here than in a month from Atlanta,” which is why the company headed west.

But Hainey Haynie was more anxious to talk about the future than the past, and how Titanium will bring new life to old desktop applications.

“Not every application will be well suited for this, but a large majority of desktop and browser applications can work well in this environment,” Hainey Haynie said.

“Today we have a product for building browser based applications. Now we’re extending it into desktop and mobile.

“Longer term you can use Appcelerator to build all those applications, and deploy them across all those systems. The same for the background. The SDK lets you pick and choose packing technologies – Java or PHP on the back end.”

Hainey Haynie also revealed that Appcelerator is moving to a services-based business model, rather than relying on support subscriptions as most open source companies have for years.

“We are working on a set of products running in the cloud, monetized through application life cycle products that live in the cloud, all very additive to development.

“We’ll offer a set of services you can buy on a premium to premium basis. That’s how we’re going to monetize it.”

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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.

At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.

DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.

My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.

Biography

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

Talkback Most Recent of 1 Talkback(s)

  • ...and then there was MSIE-7
    How about having the guys at Appcelerator really try-out the demo download links at
    http://titaniumapp.com/demos in MSIE-7. Not much of a here's-a-link-to-click feedback when in XP and MSIE-7 -- the digitis secundus mouse pointer. But, hey, that's in a foreign version of MSIE-7...

    //Non-Twitterer
    ZDNet Gravatar
    scallag
    11th Dec 2008

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