We are starting to see increasing awareness of Curl as a serious RIA alternative to Adobe's Flex/AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight. Check this post from Paula Rooney today. First Martin Heller's excellent description of a good RIA delivered an wide-angle view of what a true Rich Internet Application should be. When we address the enterprise space, where serious mission-critical applications must be delivered via the web (instead of the traditional client-server platform of yesteryears), basic issues of scalability, reliability, security, and speed must be addressed.
Then there is the issue of programmer productivity and agile development. Having to deal with multiple islands of technology (Javascript or Actionscript, CSS, DOM, MXML, computational language like C# for serious OO programming, etc.) to construct a web-based application is highly non-trivial. Many Ajax users have to search for 3rd. party tools for charting and controls. The programming burden tends to be heavy.
As Web 2.0 gets increased use in the consumer space, enterprises must start looking at the broader issue of total application construction and delivery on the web platform. Just doing some tagging and mashups as an entry point is interesting but it is like a "solution looking for a problem". The challenge is also for packaged application providers such as SAP and Oracle to shift gear and convert their traditional client-server architectures to new web-based delivery. The same comment applies to BI vendors (e.g. Business Objects, Cognos, SAS, etc.) as well.
Curl's successful use by 300 enterprise-scale customers in Japan and Korea is a testimony to its strength as an enterprise-ready platform for RIA.
So ISV's, wake up and take a look at Curl as the oxygen to enable your switch to the web.