Appcelerator has announced the public preview release of Appcelerator Titanium, an open source platform for building desktop and mobile applications using a common set of Web technologies.

Titanium allows developers to use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to develop applications that can be deployed to multiple platforms, including the desktop, the browser, or the mobile device. Titanium desktop applications 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.

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