We are finally live with our upgrade to the Developer Center.   Apologies for the intermittent failures as we switched over to the new Jive platform.

As you'll see the site has a similar design but there are some great new features available to you.

The following bullets provide an overview of the key new functionality supported in our update:

• Personalized homepage. Users now have the ability to customize their homepage after log on. The new site has two tabs, one for selecting the default homepage (Standard View) and the personalized homepage (Your View), which enables you to add content blocks and modify your page by choosing what you want to see such as news, blogs, updates plus many more options, all in one place.
• Enhanced people search. This new feature supports enhanced search criteria by filtering on multiple attributes, tags, or any content the person has created using the People function.
  • Expanded fields on user profiles.
  • Sort the user list by user name, status level, date joined, relevance.
  • Filter the user list by alpha (user name), occupation, join date, company, city, country.
• Groups.  Users can create groups that focus on topics of interest.  Group spaces support blogs, forums, and document content including granular permissions and privacy settings.  Groups are not assigned to specific community/sub-community spaces.
• Project spaces.  Users can create project spaces for communicating and collaborating around content.  Project spaces are assigned to specific community/sub-community spaces and can support blogs, forums, and document content depending on the user permission settings for the parent community.
• New HTML editor Renders your HTML with JavaScript or even CSS. You can embed a YouTube video, insert Digg's widget script, or display photos from your Flickr account.
  

We hope you will take advantage of the new features in the Curl Community Update. We want to hear your feedback so please comment on in the discussion group . Feedback on New Curl Developer Center

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 use hypothetical data they are based on real customer examples.  It's easy to plug in your own data and start to measure the actual savings you might get.

You may have have noticed we added a link to Twitter in our Developer Center banner. You can follow Curl at http://twitter.com/Curltech.  We post all developer center activity and all the interesting RIA articles we find via our Delicious tagging.

You may be skeptical about all the hype surrounding Twitter and wondering why it's getting so much attention.  Indeed, Twitter is rapidly becoming  the way to stay informed about the things that interest you as they happen in real-time .  Twitter's real-time search is fueling its rapid growth into the mainstream.

Occasionally a simple idea turns into something huge and just as  Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL morphed into the Internet so it will be with Twitter.

So what is Twitter's simple idea and why is it significant?

From a simple technology perspective Twitter is Publish-Subscribe SMS.  It combines the publish-subscribe communication paradigm with real-time of instant messaging.

Publish-subscribe is a many to many broadcast protocol. I publish, many people listen. In fact as a publisher I don't need to know who is subscribing. If I have something interesting to say I can publish. If you find what I say interesting you can subscribe. This communication has its roots in the written word from cave dwellers hieroglyphs, to books, to newspapers, to websites to blogs and now to Twitter. Each technology transition from hieroglyphs to twitter has made publishing more immediate. Now by combining Publish-subscribe with SMS it's virtually real-time.

Additionally Twitter has opened up the network of subscriptions so that anyone can see who is subscribing (following) to who. Given the nature of social networks (6 degrees of separation) his means that interesting news has the ability to reach virtually everyone in six retweets.  This is significant because I can use Twitter to find what's happening in real-time and be alerted if something I care about happens when it happens.

Twitter is born of the same Cluetrain manifesto empowerment that drove blogging to prominent mainstream status.  You can think of Twitter as real-time blogging.  Jack Dorsey, Twitter's co-founder described his creation as

??an idea to make a more ?live? LiveJournal. Real-time, up-to-date, from the road. Akin to updating your AIM status from wherever you are, and sharing it.

Already Tweets have evolved from ?I?m having breakfast? and ?I?m watching it snow? to a powerful tool for building brand and a great way to keep up with what you?re passionate about. And because Twitter is open there is a whole industry for tools to help make Twitter even more effective. Now media giants like CNN are using such tools as a sort of police scanner to be alerted to the next news story. CNN broke the story of The Turkish airline crash which it was[ alerted to it by Twitter|http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/02/25/twitter.amsterdam.plane.crash/index.html].

While Google, Yahoo and others tried to perform real-time search through their "Alert" function it does not work adequately. The main reason is their alerting mechanisms are based on repeated search of the database they build through "crawling" the Internet. The delay in that approach means that alerts to matches can be considerably later than real-time as I pointed out in this blog post, Cutting Through The Incessant Barking.  Real-time works with Twitter because it limits Tweets to 140 characters which is exactly an SMS message.

As with any simple idea that drives a paradigm shift the number of use cases continues to grow only limited by the imagination of its users. While it took 20 years for Tim Berners-Lee's simple idea of the URL to morph into the Internet I think Twitter will be mainstream in a matter of years.

You can follow me at http://twitter.com/RichardTreadway.

For that last 2 years we have been tagging interesting RIA related

content using Delicious.  Our tag cloud which you can find under

the username CurlTech now has over 1,400 bookmarks. 

As such  it is a collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to

the market and technology trends.  I thought it would be useful to share

the content we tag weekly as itserves as a great bibliography for those doing

research on RIA.

We have been categorizing the content we find into three major groups:

• Business case for RIA

• Technology Comparisons

• RIA User Interfaces

Here is this weeks round up. . 

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on \\\\\"The Current and Future State of RIA\\\\\"

Impact

By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

InfoQ has just conducted a Virtual Panel on ?The Current and Future State

of RIA? featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and

well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java,

Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of

questions relating to whether RIA technologies have ?made it?, what the

optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications

will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the

various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!

Forrester

By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now

time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to

include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription

pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor

lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008

Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in

December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions.

The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts

across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn

ZDNet

By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small

article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding

to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the

Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage

digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing

InfoQ

By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA

plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by

Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9

Inside RIA.com

By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of

visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released,

Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk

on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the

Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link

Info World

By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2

SD Times

By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's

future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad

overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that

series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source

Dr. Dobb's Journal

By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing

enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun

loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register

By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated:Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is

again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups

for the latest update to enterprise Java.

This morning, InfoQ published the contents of a virtual panel on RIA where I participated. Besides me, there were members from Microsoft, Adobe, Mozilla, Sun, etc.

Here is the link.

Six questions were answered by each panelist.

Curl gets some good visibility here.

I just saw a post on why enterprise applications suck.

It starts with this statement - There's a quality about some software that inspires love in their users, and it's totally devoid in enterprise software. The best you can ever say about enterprise software is when it doesn't get in the way of the business. At it's worst, enterprise software creates more work than it automates.

Therefore it's high time for enterprises to "modernize" their applications on a web architecture with very attractive user interface. Such applications must mimic the business process, not the other way around as evident from many of the packaged applications in use today. The vendor attitude seems to be - here is the application, now go adjust your process to fit into the idiosyncrasy of the application design. What an unnatural act!

Our experience with Curl in enterprise clients prove that visually attractive design on the web platform is the way to go, moving away from "fat client" architectures of the past, at very high cost. Take a look at another of  my blog posts in Sys-Con, discussing the vendor landscape in enterprise RIA.

Recently I was invited by Info-Q (Scott Delap) to participate in a virtual roundtable discussion on RIA. Other invitees are - Ryan Stewart (Adobe), Tim Sneath (Microsoft), Scott Stanfield (Vertigo), John Resig, Peter Pilgrim, and Didier Girard. The final roundtable discussion will happen and I am not sure if all the names will participate. But I was sent six questions to answer and I am posting my answers below.

1.  The web has been large dominated by "pages" and not "applications" despite the advent of RIA technologies.  In the last year we have seen the shift accelerate however with websites featuring "mini-applications" for video, interactive exploration, etc.  Given this change has RIA finally "made it".

JRD ? I think there is much more RIA in the consumer space, as the need for moving from static refreshable pages (hence latency) to dynamic interactive applications is strong. For the enterprise RIA, there is no choice but to provide interactive and stateful transactional applications, as that?s what they are used to in the client-server model. However, enterprise RIA is yet to take off in the US. We see a lot more use in Japan for the Curl RIA platform.

2.  As RIA technologies have been introduced, portability has been stressed.  However, user demands are driving native integration with file systems, docks/taskbars, calendaring, and other os level items.  Do you think RIA platform will focus more on such integration in the next few years or continue to work towards interoperability instead?

JRD ? Again, let us distinguish between consumer RIA vs. enterprise RIA. We see more interoperability needs than integration needs. Wherever we get benefit of the client OS (such as exploiting drivers for video rendering), Curl uses them for fast performance. The approach seems to be client-side integration and server side interoperability (incidentally Curl does not have any server-side code).

3.  Video is the largest application type driving RIA adoption at the moment.  What other types of applications to you see driving RIA technology adoption in the next 12-18 months.

JRD – We at Curl focus on web-based enterprise applications that demand high scalability, reliability, security, performance and predictability. The motivation is to switch over from client-server applications of last 15 years to a web based architecture that reduces TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) drastically. Frankly, video does not appear as a high priority for these applications at all. That is the reason why Curl has 400 large enterprises as customers running mission critical business applications. Not a single customer has deployed video.

4.  Given your target framework/language what is its greatest strength versus the rest of the field at the moment (Ajax, GWT, Curl, Flex, Silverlight, JavaFx, etc)?

JRD – Curl’s greatest strength is developer productivity (one language covers the entire spectrum of text, graphics, grids, as well as object oriented types and classes), and run-time advantages of scalability, very high volume of data handling, fast performance due to client-side compilation to machine code, and high security features. These are the basic requirements of all large enterprises for mission-critical applications for their business.

5.  Given your target framework/language what is its greatest weakness  versus the rest of the field at the moment?

JRD –Curl's greatest weakness is its relative obscurity.  Most of our customers have tried and failed with Ajax and Flex before discovering that Curl can solve their high performance and security needs. Also, video rendering is not one of our strengths as that was never a target.

6.  Most RIA languages are not used for both client and server development.  Typically backend work is done in PHP, Java, .NET, etc.  How do you see this polygot programming (http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2006/12/polyglot-programming.html) model effecting RIA?

JRD – I like the phrase Polyglot. Frankly it’s a mess. We observe that the world is polarizing to two-language schemes (e.g. C# & XAML; ActionScript & MXML; JavaFX & Java). One could argue that 2 is better than 4 and 4 is better than 6. But we at Curl believe in 1 language covering both the presentation stuff and the logic stuff. Hence the researchers at MIT designed one uniform language addressing the entire spectrum. This results in tremendous “programmer economy”, something we don’t seem to focus in the RIA world. Our customer experience substantiates this advantage greatly.

Curl is a great multi-paradigm language for building rich client applications. We hope you add it to your language repertoire.

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.