I probably should expand this a bit in my own blog … but for now I’ll just comment inline:

- You do have to edit HTML. But at least that’s a known entity and better than proprietary MXML for Flex or other tools like that.

- We do support localization out-of-the-box and have since day one.

- We are concentrating on building more widgets and are increasing every day. With the 2.1 release in 2 weeks, we’ll have almost 20 of all types of UI, layout and advanced controls. With our new developer network which will launch in a few weeks, we’ll also open up widgets to outside and allow people to upload their own widgets and help others manage them and share them with others.

- While we do support an optimized remoting protocol based in AJAX and HTTP/JSON – we also now support REST as well (both in-domain and cross-domain) with our new app:http widget. In addition, the marshalling and transport layers are completely open and can be swapped out with other mechanisms (we’ve done this with another framework called Phococoa where we used form url-encoded POSTs instead of AJAX calls).

- URIs can also be bookmarked (we call this history tracking and it’s available now) and we’re working to make this easier and more robust.

- With 2.1 we’ll introduce a new just-in-time compiler which also compiling on the fly in the server environment the appcelerator-enabled HTML which will compile down to the DHTML/Javascript which is completely HTML 4.0 valid (assuming the author does make their HTML + appcelerator code valid).

- We have a new Eclipse-based RIA developer product which will be released in the next release in a couple weeks which will introduce code assist, project creation, update management, syntax highlighting and just-in-time code/web preview.

- Appcelerator can be used unobtrusively following the Unobtrusive Javascript (UJS) pattern. For example, with 2.1 you can do $(‘mydiv’).on(‘click then effect[highlight]‘) and place that JS code in a standalone javascript file

Beyond 2.1, we’ll start to introduce other services on top of Java — such as Groovy, Grails, JRuby, etc. so that you can use the power of the JVM but the simplicity/productivity of scripting languages to build your services.

Our community is growing fast and we welcome collaboration with other open source projects and developers. Our goal is to be the RIA-enabler for the next generation SOA-based web.

AppAcelerator does seem to support REST operations int the HTTP widget.

“The http widget provides a way to do HTTP POSTs and GETs to any URL that returns a well-formed XML or a JSON result. This is very useful for doing REST operations to a 3rd party website”