Most of the docs and examples for the Apollo alpha are Flex / ActionScript focused (next beta will be more focused on HTML / JavaScript). However, you can build Apollo applications using just HTML and JavaScript.
Here is a simple example that shows how to build an HTML / JavaScript Apollo application, and how to access Apollo APIs from JavaScript. The application shows how to launch a file browser from the application, and access information about the selected file (you could then easily read in the contents of the file).