In a low-key internal blog this week, Intel has started to talk publicly about a new online beta tool called the Intel AppUp encapsulator. The company is positioning the new offering as a route to take web applications written in JavaScript, HTML5, Ajax, and Flash and turn those files into a MeeGo or Windows application for the Intel AppUp developer center and app store. No manual SDK code integration and no complex compiling is needed, says the company.
According to the official AppUp Developer Blog, "The Intel AppUp encapsulator embeds web code into a native application wrapper (a hybrid app) and then creates installer packages. The native application wrapper integrates the Intel AppUp SDK for store authorization and Qt WebKit, which provides the HTML5 and JavaScript engines that execute and render the web app code."
The company also specifies that developers can use their own web APIs, third-party APIs and other third-party widgets. In effect, the developer builds the web code just like other web apps utilizing HTML, CSS and JavaScript, images, and AJAX. Essentially, if we accept the functionality of Intel's beta here, then the launch of this tool could allow developers, with just a few mouse clicks, to compile an app they can sell in AppUp for either MeeGo or Windows devices.
In addition to Intel's less technical description of this new offering (i.e., extremely cool), the company has gone on to suggest that there is now a growing app ecosystem between iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7, BlackBerry, and HP webOS -- and that this means that the developer community will be increasingly looking to adopt HTML5-based apps, thereby using so-called "modern web development" to create the best new app experiences.



