Curl Blog : 2007 : August : 07

Hello. By way of introduction, my name is Richard Treadway and I have been helping Curl with their plans to introduce the Curl RIA platform in the US market since November 2006. My background is mostly in product development and strategic marketing having helped define and deliver products at Digital Equipment Corp., SCO, BEA and AvantGo.

My first reaction to the problem of introducing Curl to the US market was - "OK- this won't be easy." We all know that getting adoption of a new language is a "long and winding road." But there is evidence that special purpose languages can make it to mainstream status through viral effects especially if they solve a real need. PHP (#5) and Ruby (#10) are good examples. Both are in the top 10 as measured by TIOBE Programming Community Index for August 2007 .

Curl affords an interesting opportunity in this regard. It was designed from the beginning by some very smart engineers at MIT specifically for solving the problems that RIA requires. However, back in 1998 no one had any idea of RIA or the web as an application platform. Those were the days of Web1.0 when web interfaces were simple and clunky but who cared. So Curl suffered through the dot-com boom years and finally was acquired by Sumisho Computer Systems (SCS) in 2004.

Over the last 3 years SCS has successfully marketed Curl in the Japanese market. In Japan there are over 300 enterprise class customers who use Curl in business critical applications.

For the last 6 months I have had the opportunity to travel to Japan and meet with many of these customers and get a deep understanding of how Rich Internet Applications are being used in the enterprise. I learned first hand how these customers decided RIA was important and how they measure success of their investments. Curl's customers include large enterprises like Panasonic, Toyota and SONY. In fact Curl is one of the very few RIA technologies in use in real business critical enterprise applications.

Over the next several months I will be writing about RIA in the Enterprise. Some of the topics I intend to cover include:

Enterprise use cases
Enterprise application characteristics
RIA technologies for enterprise apps
How enterprises are measuring RIA benefits
How enterprise RIA in effecting the workspace

Curl's deployments in Japan offer a unique opportunity to study RIA in the enterprise and I look forward to sharing the results of my exploration with you all.

Richard

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First a quick introduction as this is my first blogpost here. My name is Jnan Dash and I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Curl since mid-2006. My background is almost 30 years of system software development (16 years at IBM building DB2 product family and 10 years at Oracle as head of strategy and technology for the database server products).

This post will briefly look at 3 hot acronyms making the rounds these days - SOA, Web 2.0, and RIA.

For last few years, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been branded as the big force to cause IT disruption. Someone said, the half-life for hardware is 18 months, whereas the half-life for software is 18 years. So 30 years ago, we had structured programming. Then came Object Oriented programming almost 20 years ago. Now we have "service" as the new abstraction in constructing flexible applications. So business logic (code) encapsulated as "services" can be invoked and assembled as applications to mirror the business process (not the other way around).
Web 2.0 is the hottest buzzword since end of 2005. When five thousand people are denied access to a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year, you know something is happening. Web 2.0 is the new avatar of the Web as a serious platform for building read-write applications. It also emphasizes "harnessing collective intelligence" of the user community. The term Enterprise 2.0 points to the usage of Web 2.0 technologies (mostly deployed in consumer space so far) in enterprises. In other words, Web 2.0 for an enterprise will combine collaborative behavior with transactional behavior.
RIA (Rich Internet Applications) specifically refers to the development aspects of highly interactive web applications which can range from simple to very complex. Enterprises stuck in old client-server technologies for past 15 years want to embrace the Web as the user interface, instead of the desktop. With RIA, enterprises can combine the best of client-server (rich user interactions) with the ubiquity of the Web. However, many web technologies from the past (DHTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM, Flash/Flex, VB) have serious limitations in terms of high-end scalability, security, reliability, and programmer productivity (read cost and complexity). Martin Heller at InfoWorld does a comprehensive job explaining RIA.

There has to be a merger of these trends and Darryl Taft in an article in eWeek talks about this. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term to describe a set of trends and technologies such as wikis, blogs, mashups, tags, etc. Most of these are used in the consumer websites. As we focus on enterprises endorsing the web for serious business applications to lower cost and enhance user experience, an RIA front-end using Web 2.0 style approach, combined with an SOA-backend becomes the new merged architecture. The Curl product (based on research work at MIT) is an ideal front-end RIA platform for SOA-backend for enterprises. It was designed to address scalability, complex visualization, stateful transactions, reliability, and extreme performance.