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I have a couple of new examples of using our Embedded Browser Graphic in my Curl pages at logiquewerks.com

There is now an internet search browser, an e-mail browser and an on-line movies browser.

Another is for an "eyes-only" browser for text on confidential web pages using Windows and Internet Explorer.

Use the Move Controller button first and drag the controller dialog to one side.

Then click Show Document.

Suggestions welcome.  One way of defeating the "controller" was overcome today.

And it keeps an eye on the Windows clipboard ;-)

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The Curl Developer Utilities have not yet moved up to Curl 7, but if you want to install the docs in your Curl 7.0 Documentation Viewer, the step to follow are easy.

Start by making a copy of the CDU code folder in one of your curl8 working directories. Then make a copy of the manifest. Use the Curl IDE to create a new EMPTY project in that code directory. Paste back in the contents of the old manifest (the IDE will warn that the manifest.mcurl is being over-written) but edit the resulting manifest.mcurl file to flip up to 7.0 and maybe set the version metadata to 0.3.

Now the IDE should show a project with 3 packages. Dbl-click on each package and use the editor to flip the version number in the package expression up from 6.0 to 7.0. Usually you also would have to repeat the same for any .curl or .dcurl file with an applet expression as its header.

Right-click on the top pkg and set the component target settings to generate documentation and apply to all packages. Now hit F7 to deploy.. Next use the IDE to select Help | Install Docs. Click the install button on the dialog pane which opens and then navigate to the directory named deploy-default under this new project. Select the manifest.mcurl file. And you now have CurlUnit documentation back in your Curl 7.0 Documentation Viewer.

Installing the BlazeDS, SQLite and XML package documentation from sourceforge is just as easy as unzip, then use the IDE F1 | Help | Install Docs and then a click on the install button with navigation to folders named docs-install for each package. Packages usually include example code which is still zipped within the unzipped documentation folders. To try out the BlazeDS examples you are going to want a running Apache application server such as Tomcat.

With the release of[ Curl Version 7|http://www.curl.com/company_news050709.php] we have created a fun RIA Desktop application called the CurlGraph.

One of Curl?s unique features is that it supports web applications that run outside the browser, installed on the desktop as is the case with this application.

Click here to see a demo video of CurlGraph that gives you an idea of how it works and how to get it.   Check it out and have some fun seeing how your Facebook friends are interelated.

You can also get he source code here:  Curl Version 7 Sample Application: CurlGraph.

The last year has seen considerable excitement in a new breed of web applications based on Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies. Most of that excitement has been focused on consumer facing applications like Google Maps and Mail and much of that innovation has been driven by the hundreds of Ajax frameworks. However, as enterprises begin to examine how RIA technology can factor into their efforts to modernize legacy applications they are realizing that the Ajax approach has serious performance and security shortcomings. A category of RIA technologies that offer enterprise performance, scalability and security is emerging. We call this category Enterprise RIA and it includes products like Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun JavaFXand Curl.

RIA as a category

RIA has emerged as a category and analyst groups such as Forrester have been conducting various surveys and studies to quantify their benefits. What they are finding is that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that satisfy a range of needs from simple B2C to complex B2B applications. RIA for the enterprise differs significantly from RIA for consumer-centric applications. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement. Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980s and 1990s building client-server applications but now need to modernize those legacy applications taking advantage of web delivery.

Requirements of Enterprise RIA

The key requirements for enterprise RIA are as follows:

• Complex graphics and reports The platform should have many built-in User Interface and graphic report objects that support building visually appealing, effective applications without a lot of complex programming.

• Large Data Sets  Enterprise applications deal with large volumes of data that must be processed efficiently at the client. In the financial sector, the size of data sets can be hundreds of thousand of records.

• Offline-Online Enterprises need their applications to continue to operate even if connectivity is lost. When connectivity is restored the data gathered and modified at the client can be synchronized with the server.

• Very high scalability The number of concurrent users can grow fast, especially in a B2B environment, as partners, suppliers, and buyers get added to the system.

• SOA & Standards RIA must follow the basic fundamentals of Service Oriented Architecture. Although SOA discussions mostly refer to server-side application construction, the front-end must have the same attributes. Use of standards such as SOAP, WSDL, and REST must be followed for easy server-side interoperability.

• Migration tools from legacy applications To make the migration of old client-server applications, some tools should be provided to lower the cost of conversion.

• +Platform independence RIA must be able to run on any client operating system and any browser environment.

• Rich development tools  A rich IDE must be provided with appropriate plug-in to standard IDE's such as Eclipse, deployed at many large enterprises.

• Very high performance Latencies must be minimal (sub-second) for most business-critical applications. High throughput and fast performance are the two critical metrics for transactional systems. The division of work between the client and the server must be carefully evaluated to minimize the round-trips. The client-side must perform much of the user interaction and caching of data.

• Security Enterprises have strict security requirements for business-critical data. An enterprise RIA platform has to address data and application protection via various technologies such as encryption and careful use of client privilege.

• Manageability Applications must provide functions for performance monitoring and tuning. Dynamic configurability is also a requirement for changing needs.

Solutions for Enterprise RIA

The industry offers only a few solutions to the above requirements as Ajax fails in key areas such as offline operation and high scalability. While evaluating an Enterprise-scale RIA it is important to consider several metrics. These should include development time, lines of code, functionality, transaction speed, round-trip cycles, usability, and number of clicks to complete a transaction. Additionally the breadth and sophistication of the supporting libraries should be evaluated. An ideal RIA must follow the principles of SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) which advocates invocable services and assembly of such services forming an application. Most of the SOA discussion centers on server-side component assembly. An enterprise RIA should act as the front-end to the server side SOA.

It has been a busy week for RIA Technologies as the market continues to heat up.  The Twitter streams were all a buzz with #SXSWand RIA featured prominently.  Gartner's Market Scope on RIA was picked up by SD Times,  ZDnet highlighted Forrester's research on Saas and the New York Times discussed Silverlight Version 3.  Here are this week's noteworthy posts and articles.

The RIA Triumvirate at SXSW 2009

Red Monk

By Michael Cote, March 17, 2009

Thankfully for them each member of the RIA Triumvirate were in attendance. There been budget cut backs, hiring freezes, and other Financial Abyss freak out tactics from each of them, but SXSW is a conference not be missed by the three with that all important three letter strategy: RIA.

Data Watch: Rating RIA platforms

SD Times

By Staff Writer, March 15, 2009

March 15, 2009.  Adobe received the highest rating among companies with RIA platforms in Gartner's MarketScope for AJAX Technology and RIA Platforms" survey, scoring the only Strong Positive rating. The companies, which included Google, Microsoft and Oracle, were rated based on market adoption and platform  features, among other

criteria....

RIA Opinion: Why Criminal Hackers Will Love Adobe AIR

Sys-Con Media

By Bert Halstead, March 13, 2009

Adobe has released their new AIR product with much fanfare about letting developers "use proven Web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems." The grand vision that's being promoted is that AIR is pioneering the application development model of the future,  where cross platform applications will be developed using a platform independent tool such as AIR, and then deployed across the Web as downloadable gadgets that can be installed on any computer...

Forrester Research: SaaS gains enterprise adoption, expands beyond 'vanilla' offerings

ZDNet

By Dana Gardner, March 17, 2009

Software as a service (SaaS) is coming into its own, as interest and adoption continue to grow among enterprises  and SaaS itself expands to meet the challenge...

Groovy and Grails Updated

Dr. Dobb's  Journal

By Staff Writer, March 17, 2009

SpringSource has announced the availability of Grails 1.1, a rapid web application development framework based on Groovy and Spring. The company also released Groovy 1.6, the dynamic language for the Java Virtual Machine(JVM), that provides seamless integration with Java.

Microsoft to highlight Silverlight 3 technology

New York Times

By Paul Krill, March 17, 2009

Microsoft will tout at the Mix09 conference in Las Vegas this week its planned Silverlight 3 rich Internet application technology along with a host of other developer‑related offerings, according to the conference Web site.

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 16

Inside RIA.com

By David Tucker, March 16, 2009

This week we look forward to SXSW and Mix '09 and look back on Facebook coming to the desktop, a preview  of Pro JavaFX, a tool to help designers get started with Silverlight, more information on Mozilla Bespin, and  new AIR features in Aptana Studio. All this and more on the Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Presentation: Rich Internet Applications with Flex and AIR

InfoQ

By Abel Avram, March 11, 2009

In this presentation recorded during QCon London 2008, Christophe Coenraets presents Flex and AIR, two technologies from Adobe used to create, deploy and run Rich Internet Applications. After a brief introduction to each technology, Coenraets showed some applications built with them.

Adobe's Progress Report

Sys‑Con Media

By Staff Writer, March 17, 2009

This week Microsoft will make a number of announcements in the RIA space. The rumor has it that Silverlight 3 is going to be out. The rumor has it that it'll start competing with Adobe AIR. Let's take a quick look at the Adobe's progress report in the RIA space.

New Poll: ActionScript is now among the most popular languages. Which of these other languages do you use the most?

Inside RIA.com

By Rich Tretola, March 16, 2009

Recently O'Reilly's quarterly State of the Computer Book Market analysis, PartIV, Languages was released. If book sales are any indication, ActionScript is now among the most popular languages. So, with our new poll question we would like to know which other language you use the most. I realize that you may use many of the  languages on our list, so please leave comments as well. To take part in our poll, please click here.

It's not new that computers have been going through mutation - from mainframes to minis to PC to hand-held devices and smart phones now. With each step, the architecture has become more distributed. Now we are back to "centralized"  computing, as more activities move to the data centers, which are becoming  factories for computer services on an

industrial scale. Software is supposed to be delivered as "services" from such data centers. But wasn't this the theme of  SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings such as SugarCRM and SalesForce.com?

The answer is yes. SaaS, computing grids, multi-tenancy, and cloud services such as Google mail, are all precursors to  "cloud computing". As per the Economist magazine, 69% of Americans are connected to the web and use some kind of cloud service such as web-based mail and online data storage. Google has been pushing this model via Gmail, spreadsheet, and documents. These services will come in 3 layers - infrastructure, applications, and periphery (where they will meet the real world). I read somewhere that there are 70,000 data centers in the US, out of which 30% are no longer in use. Also, only 6% of the server capacity is used. This excess unused capacity is also pushing for the cloud model.

Amazon is considered the pioneer in this movement, with their S3 (Simple Shared Storage, storage rented from the cloud at cheap cost), and EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud, processing cycles are available as and when needed). So the other players like Microsoft and Google are building huge data centers. Microsoft is adding 35000 servers a month, while Google has 36 data centers with about 2 million servers. The new data centers are being located in states like Washington and Oregon with low-cost electric power.

Cloud computing seems like a logical post-SaaS step, where measured, monitored, business process can be made available to clients. The current economic climate is also pushing the theme of "more with less" and cost savings as key principles. The days of under-used inhouse data centers are over. The new mantra -  web as the platform architecture, application modernization with web-based dynamic UI, and software available as cloud services. With the proliferation of hand-held devices and smart phones, the cloud computing model makes sense.

"Tech Titans' Web Battle" - The headline of an article by Brandon Bailey in today's Mercury proclaims as news the story we've been telling for 2 years now - The war for dominance of the next desktop is on. The big boys have realized it for a while now and the battle lines have been drawn within the new RIA platform category. The fact that this story has caught the attention of the Merc is further proof the fight is going mainstream. Gartner's recent Market focus report on RIA and Forrester's planned wave are further evidence the market is heating up and that RIA is a legitimate category. We are now seeing a class of applications that are going beyond the simple dynamic interactivity possible through Ajax and into complex standalone desktop applications. With the more sophisticated RIA platforms it is now possible to replace client-server applications with much lower cost web applications. Of course the Mercury article only mentions the titan products: Adobe's Flash/AIR, Microsoft's Silverlight and Sun's JavaFX but notes:

"analysts say it's unlikely that one company will dominate this field — at least not in the near future. But the market is huge"

Indeed many of our over 400 customers found us only after trying and failing with Ajax or Flash. While sites such as Google or Yahoo handle very large numbers of users, the interactivity with business-critical databases and existing legacy applications is not a requirement.  Enterprise RIA focuses on Fortune 1000 companies who spent a lot of resources during the 1980’s and 1990’s building client-server applications using the rich user interface of desktop clients such as Windows.

2009 should be a defining year for RIA platforms as more and more enterprises look to replace and modernize their old client server applications with web applications.

Given the hard economic times, enterprises are tight on their IT spending. However, anything that can yield cost savings has become attractive. One such area is switching from antiquated client-server applications to a web based architecture, much like what our Japanese customers have done. We are calling that Application Modernization. Richard Treadway has written a blog post on this subject, showing the business case and great savings.

Recently I was asked by SiliconIndia magazine ( a Bay Area publication) to write an article on application modernization for the enterprise. This is just published in the February issue.

You can see the article here.

You have not seen or heard much from me lately as I am very busy in a Curl refactoring task at my day job.

My latest enthusiasm is for my new Asus Eee 900A linux netbook PC. I am yet to get our Debian Curl package to run on it, but when I do - and I will - you are sure to hear from me.

This little netbook runs the Xandros linux "easy-mode" KDE which has to be just the simplest thing to pick up and use. Getting up and running was just a matter of choosing a user name and a password. Starts up fast - real fast (20s ?) - after a shutdown (which I have done only once since I bought it just to check that behavior.)

The desktop is using a tab metaphor and is quite unobtrusive (vanishes when you open an app or other window but is only a click away.)

If you have another kind of netbook+linux combination with Curl running on it, please add a note here.

The netbook looks like a great appliance for corporate communications which exceed the PDA format: it is just great for browsing documentation. What it lacks is an app like Microsoft OneNote ... or a decent set of hypercards.

This Eee has the Intel Atom processor and in my case runs for hours without a recharge

The Eee 901 PC is probably what you will be looking for: it has a larger solid-state hardrive and you may want a built-in camera for Skype and such. There seems to be no problem getting these little netbooks to dual-boot.

Now if it just could talk to an iTunes device ...

And on the sports front, I see that our namesake in USA winter Olympics try-outs had very good representation from MN. But how are they doing for sponsors? (hint: I added the tags 'rink', 'rock', 'skip' and 'team' for those who think the only four-letter Scots sport is golf ... )

Yesterday Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service wrote at InfoWorld about how Silverlight adoption is being hampered by the economic crisis.  She makes the point that in lean times, UI design is often one of the first part of application development to be cut and that Microsoft's Silverlight is being affected by this.

While her article is about slow Silverlight adoption I think the more important point is that when times get tight, usability is the first to be sacrificed. Enterprises consider the job done as long as there is some way to perform each needed function, no matter how clunky it is.  The phenomenon of SAP, Oracle, etc., offering cumbersome Web 1.0 interfaces to their software and then considering that the problem of Web-enabling their software is now "solved" would be an example of such thinking. 

We’ve been making the case to customers that it’s a false economy to ignore the UI, because you can actually save real money by making your application and your people more efficient if you give it some priority. See my post on the Business Case for RIA here.

While 2008 was a break out year for RIA technologies we expect 2009 to be even more exciting.  It was good to see the recognition that Ryan Stewart gave Curl in his recent ZDnet post Looking Ahead to 2009. Thanks Ryan. 

Over the last year we have considerably raised the visibility of Curl as the Enterprise RIA platform.  We have grown our customer base to over 400.  In 2009 we plan to continue to document the customer use cases to help highlight the bottom line business benefits of RIA adoption.

Over 2008 we made numerous releases and continued to deliver on our strategy build out our open source offering with

the WSDK (March 2008) and the CDK (July 2009).  We also introduced our Version 7 beta release code named Nitro that significantly improves the ease of installation for off-line desktop applications. Finally we added Eclipse support with the release of the CDE.  All in all it was a very busy and productive year. 

Already 2009 has started with a bang as we released the CDK-DS which have gotten considerable visibility. With the CDK-DS Curl now has and end to end story for data intensive applications.  Next up will be the release of version 7.

Many Curl engagements involve application modernization. Now that Web applications are reaching the sophistication of client-server capabilities enterprises are finally considering replacing them.  It was with interest I read Tim Pacileo's article in eWeek on How to Build a Business Case for Application Modernization.

Tim opens by saying:

?CIOs of large organizations recognize the benefits of modernizing applications and moving away from legacy systems. But starting the process?and justifying the investment needed in an application modernization initiative?can be daunting. And too often, the potential gains of a streamlined environment are deferred in favor of a short-term focus on cost containment through maintenance of outdated, redundant and inefficient legacy applications.?

Indeed many of our sales situations involve making a trade-off between strategic long-term investment and short-term cost containment. In these situations we help customers construct the business case for a strategic investment.  With over 400 enterprise class customers we have a lot of actual examples of Curl implementations providing real business savings.  Unfortunately the details of these examples are mostly company confidential.  Recently we have been detailing possible business savings based real customer cases but using example data.  We find this helps in getting the discussion going on what the opportunity for savings could be.  Here are three examples:

• Better Performance -The current application takes 90 seconds to perform a complex data visualization. If 1,000 employees perform this operation 50 times per day this is 1250 hours of wait time per day.  If the visualization time is reduced to 1 second this saves 300,000 hours per year and at $20/hour that is more than $6M/year!

• Better Visualization - The current process to find error patterns in operational data takes 60 minutes and the department of 100 employees whose job it is to identify and fix these errors typically finds 600 errors a day. If good data visualization can reduce the time to find one error pattern to 10 minutes this would save 500 hours per day or 130,000 hours per year.  At $20 per hour this is $2.6M in savings per year!

• Support Cost - The current client-server application must be updated 6 times a year to 10,000 users. Each update costs $5 in distribution and material costs and 15 minutes of end user time. A Web application would eliminate this cost and save approximately $600,000 a year.

While these examples are based on fictitious data it's easy to plug in your own data and start to measure the actual savings you might get.

It is great to see that when the Curl 6.0.5 IDE is saving/closing a 3.0.x project that it no longer saves the CPRJ file with metadata about styles. The effect of this was to render that CPRJ file invalid for a developer still using a Curl 3.0.x IDE (project would not load). The work-around was to manually edit the CPRJ to remove the default styles info (only 3 lines near the top of the CPRJ file) or to try not to commit it to source version-control (easier said than done when working under pressure.)

Thanks folks. Much appreciated!

I had a chance to give a talk about "Enterprise RIA Development Using Curl" at the Software Development Best Practices conference in Boston last month.  Presentations at this conference are organized into 90-minute "classes."  The length of these classes is a challenge but also an opportunity to tell the Curl story more completely than is possible in your typical conference presentation.  In case you're curious about what gets covered in a 90-minute talk about Curl for enterprise applications, I've attached a PDF file of the presentation to this blog post.

The talk itself went well and the audience asked good questions.  Afterward, I had a chance to attend a few other presentations.  I concluded that the SD Best Practices team really vet their speakers much more carefully than average: the quality of the presentations that I attended was uniformly excellent, and far above what I have come to expect at a typical conference.

Curl was also invited to enter a team into the conference's Developer Bowl, a trivia contest about computer-related topics conducted in the style of the College Bowl.  The other teams came from Cisco, IBM, and Nokia.  In the first round, our Curl team, consisting of Christopher Barber, William Bardwell, Tom Lyons, and yours truly, triumphed over IBM.  In the final round we were edged by Cisco on the final tie-breaking question.

If you have a Curl NITRO project and you want to have, say, the documentation for the Curl opensource web toolkit available as a library which you can search when working in Curl7, just add 7.0 to the WSDK docs manifest.mcurl  file.

For example, I unzipped the 1.0.6 WSDK zip into a Curl7 folder and then went to my

C:\Curl7\WSDK_071120\docs-install\WSDK

and changed the manifest header to

{curl 6.0, 7.0 manifest}

This only means that I can search across those Curl 6 API docs when doing a Curl 7 project without the documentation viewer complaining about a version inconsistency.

If you haven't added documentation before, it is very straight-forward: just open the HELP menu of the doc viewer (the 'help' window of the Curl IDE.)  You will want to select a manifest.mcurl that is in a folder designated as being the 'documentation' version of a package such as the WSDK.

The nice thing about the viewer is that if you close it, close your project and then open a Curl 5 project, the documentation in HELP will now be whatever you have selected (i.e. installed) as your Curl 5 documentation.

Documentation for your own code can be improved by using the macro's   and {doc-next } which are detailedin the Contents menu of the Curl Documentation Viewer in the section

Curl IDE User's Guide

under the heading

Documenting Your Application

Of course, as you may recall, COBOL programmers document best while sleeping.