For quite sometime (as far as I can remember I have tracking it now for 5 months) now there has been enough buzz around Apollo, the new cross platform RIA toolkit from Adobe. The Ajaxian even has a video demo of it.
I still remember the Aha! feeling I had when I first installed Google desktop search, not just for how it was finding all the java source on my machine but also about how it was using a local http server to run. As web application developers we have always been running those giant j2ee (oops its jee now) on our machines. But the idea of having a small footprint server running primarily to render (what would have been conventionally a mfc/winforms or swing) a desktop application seemed pretty cool.
I had to wait for a whole year before I had the oppurtunity to build one such app (linux-Rails-lighttpd-sqlite) and eventually when we did, we ran into some not necessarily serious but certainly annoying limitations of the browser. (Thank God for Ajax we can now atleast poll for bits of data but still we dont have a simple model for Http Push. I will reserve this topic for a future blog).
One portion of the application had to be entirely rewritten in Flash as it was the best option available from which we could construct something fancy. The rewrite left us clearly aspiring for something like Apollo. A simple, runtime environment that allowed us to run a flash app on Gentoo like a desktop app.
We wished somehow this could be packaged as a regular desktop app capable of connecting to a tiny db like sqlite and also be able to do some file I/O. And with only the browser being a reasonable container our option to host a flash it left us asking for more.
With Apollo (Adobe says it is not a browser but something using which you can build a browser) hopefully some of the annoyances will go away (you can do file I/O and there is talk of db connectivity coming later).

And last but not the least what will be its impact on the enterprise. With Ruby/Rails making some decent headway into the enterprise will the future enterprise app be a Apollo-Ruby,Rails-Apache,Mongrel-MySQL/Postgres combo? Would love my job (more!!!) if it ever gets to that.
Certainly from the demo it looks like finally we might have a way to seamlessly move between desktop apps and web apps (the video shows the user dragging a vCard from his local address book and dropping it on Google Maps).

In the past the approach to RIA has been to try and push as much rich content into the browser but here with Apollo it atleast seems like they are trying the other way round. Hopfeully if I understand it correctly its more of a desktop runtime into which an existing web application can be pulled.

Weather it delivers what it seems to be promising is something to be seen. Also the other concern I have is how much ActionScript do I have to learn. Ideally I would prefer Zero (not that AS is bad but I just that I prefer Ruby).
And certainly it will be interesting to see how it scores on these parameters.