The public preview release of Appcelerator Titanium™, an open source platform for building desktop and mobile applications using a common set of Web technologies has been announced by a leading provider of open source technologies for building and managing rich Web applications, Appcelerator, Inc.

Including the desktop, the browser or the mobile device, Titanium allows developers to use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript to quickly and easily develop applications that can be deployed to multiple platforms. Titanium desktop applications, unlike traditional Web applications, which are limited to operating within the browser, are able to read and write local data on the desktop and interact with the operating system. In particular, Titanium enables developers to build desktop Web applications that can operate both online and offline.

An industry analyst with RedMonk, Michael Coté, stated: “Developing for the desktop had shifted down in priority in recent years. But desktop development has recently picked up more interest as rich Internet application technologies have pulled down the web development experience to the desktop.” He added: “Increasingly, developers have the option to use known web frameworks to expand into a previously unreachable area, the desktop.”

Titanium is part of the growing group of open source communities that are working together to bring Web applications to the desktop. Including WebKit, Gears and Chromium, Titanium is built on top of a number of leading open source technologies. Titanium is designed to work on Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop operating systems. The Windows and Mac version of Titanium are available immediately and the Linux version will be available in January 2009.

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