Yahoo last week announced it is working on BrowserPlus, a development platform for creating Web applications that contain desktop capabilities.

BrowserPlus joins similar projects, including Google's Gears, Adobe's AIR, Mozilla's XUL, Microsoft's Silverlight and others, designed to let developers make applications that leverage the best of the desktop and Web environments.

Yet questions abound regarding these competing efforts, such as whether they will create confusion among users, and about BrowserPlus itself, which developers can download and examine but cannot currently build anything with.

Last Thursday, IDG News Service had a chance to pose these and other questions to Skylar Woodward, principal software engineer at Yahoo's Brickhouse division, and to Cody Simms, senior director of product management for the company's Yahoo Open Strategy effort.

An edited version of the interview follows:

What is the status of BrowserPlus?

Cody Simms: The version out there is production ready, so we'll be engaging with partners to start getting BrowserPlus supported on sites around the Web. Then we plan a broader, fuller, self-service release later this year.

Today, developers can't build it into their sites. They can download it to their desktops and play with it and see what services it can make available to them as though they were an end-user looking at it. They can get in and look at the code they'd be able to integrate with their site, but they can't build their site around it just yet, except for a select set of partners we're going to be working with.

Skylar Woodward: It's production ready today to use it on any partner site. In terms of everything being baked and ready, so developers don't have to change [their applications] too much later, the reason why we're putting it out now is because we want this to be an open community discussion about what things should be in here and how it should work. We want people to look at our APIs [application programming interfaces] and be critical and evaluate them. So in that sense, [regarding] the most flexible part of the system, which are the services, we'd love to get community feedback so this isn't something that's already set and won't change. We want to respond to the community, and listen to what they want and need, so that when we [release it into general availability], there doesn't have to be a lot of changing [of applications.]

BrowserPlus sounds similar to Google's Gears and other initiatives like Adobe's AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Is it?

Simms: You're seeing a strong trend toward people realizing that there can be a bridge between the browser and the desktop. So there are a number of different technologies out there playing in that arena. Each one of the technologies that has been announced or released recently has fairly different use cases about how you can bridge those two things and tackle the problem. Some of them are more focused on bringing Web functionality to the desktop, while others are more focused on bringing desktop functionality to the browser.

BrowserPlus is uniquely focused on making the browser richer with all these kinds of pieces of functionality that normally would be reserved for desktop clients. BrowserPlus has some strengths related to how easily and quickly we can deploy new services. We're not focused on one monolithic use case. BrowserPlus is very focused on being an open platform that can be extended with new types of services and thus enable new, interesting functionality. We don't yet know what will be the killer app that will be built on BrowserPlus, but we want to enable the development community to discover that by using it.