Will Kraft at Application Development Times took the Curl IDE for a test drive and is favorably impressed with what he discovered.
After installing, I was greeted with a development environment that reminded me of programming IDEs that I have used in the past, such as Visual Basic and Eclipse. Each Curl project is made of several modules containing code or graphical user interface (GUI) elements, with the entire list of modules conveniently available at all times in the IDE.
The GUI editor in particular is quite nice, with many UI control elements such as buttons, menu boxes, etc. available from a toolbar list, with attributes for each element available on another panel. These tools quickly allow a programmer to make a complicated GUI for a project, although doing it entirely from the source code interface is also an option for more advanced users. A project may be tested by clicking a "run" button on the main toolbar, just like in Visual Basic.
Although my knowledge of the Curl programming language was very limited at the beginning, I was able to make and successfully run a "Hello World" program after consulting an online tutorial. The code syntax is somewhat similar to CSS, with the document structure reminding me of LaTeX, although there are differences. The language gets its name from the use of the "{ }" curly brackets that are used to enclose each command in a Curl application.Kraft's biggest concerns were the lack of a Linux version suitable for deployment on Ubuntu and other distros that do not use RPM packages and the "cost" of installing the RTE before being able to run Curl applications on the client. As he correctly observes, in an enterprise setting, the decision to deploy Curl is one that would necessarily include rolling out the RTE to users' desktops. The architecture of Curl's approach to application delivery and execution is based on the underlying conviction that small application downloads and native hardware performance trump server-side approaches – especially in enterprise application environments. As to the Ubuntu question, what are your thoughts? Should we undertake an effort to package the Curl IDE for use on this popular distro?
I use Ubuntu 7.10 and Slackware 12. I know with Ubuntu you can use the alien program to convert an rpm to a deb package file. Haven't tried it myself though. I believe Slackware also has a similar tool. Regardless, this is not a highly recommended way to install packages to non-rpm based systems. Due to the recent popularity of Ubuntu I think the curl user base would be given a significant boost if you provided a .deb package install.