With the release of the RIA Technology Study we commissioned from Sonata it is now clear that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that serve the diverse needs of Internet applications. These needs define a spectrum from simple B2C interfaces to the more complex highly visual interfaces of real-time enterprise dashboards.
We have created the following graphic to position the RIA technologies along a spectrum from B2C to B2E and B2B.
From the moment I first heard of Curl it was clear to me that it was uniquely suited for demanding enterprise applications. But all our evidence was anecdotal. Now with the release of the Sonata report we have actual numbers to support that positioning.
We have been working with Jeffrey Hammond at Forresterto validate this positioning. It was good to see Jeffrey's comments in the Redmond Developer News article by John Waters.
""Curl has positioned itself exclusively for enterprise organizations, and mainly for business-to-business RIA apps... the Curl RIA platform stacks up well against the competition"Additionally we have been working with Ryan Stewart, ZDNet bloggerand Abobe RIA Evangelist help educate the market on the Benefits of RIA. We gave Ryan a preview of the Sonata report which he highlighted in this post.
One of the more interesting findings of the report is the trade-off between the size of the run time environment and the size of the application download. The flowing graphs show the RTE and application sizes.
While Ajax has no RTE it takes a heavy penalty with the largest application size. At the other end of the spectrum Curl's runtime is the largest at almost 8MB but using pCurl compression it has the smallest application size by a wide margin. This design trade-off further validates Ajax as the choice for simple B2C applications that can't tolerate a commitment to downloading a large RTE. While Curl is most appropriate for larger more complex B2E and B2B applications where downloading an RTE once is well worth the benefit in application performance and scale.
Richard