Curl Blog : 2008 : January

RIA - Awareness is still low

Posted by jnan Jan 14, 2008

In a blog post, Ryan Stewart commented on my interview with Dr. Dobb's journal. Ryan quoted my comment on enterprises endorsing Web 2.0 via RIA, as a valuable one. When you read Ryan's post, please read the first comment. Someone suggested if that was "pay for interview". I refuted it since we were approached by the editorial board at Dr. Dobb's Journal for the interview rather than vice versa.

Ryan further commented: Jnan said below that it wasn't a pay deal, but I think it shows how little people know about RIAs in a lot of circles. I think part of the reason that it came off as a section of the about page on Curl was that Dr. Dobbs readers have no idea about RIAs or Curl. It's the price we pay to get information out.

Ryan has a valid point. The awareness on RIA is quite low. The Web 2.0 noise does not include RIA as a key component. They speak of tagging, mash-ups, wikis, bolgs, social software, etc. No CIO has a clue regarding the business value of any of these cool technologies. Believe me, I have friends in several companies pushing these technologies and when it comes to use in the large coprorations, they do not know how. RIA is the low-hanging fruit because it immensley improves the user experience.

Imagine a large corporation having 30,000 PC's dispersed all over the country at field locations. The application is an old client-server one serving the field engineers. Then comes the upgrade to Vista and associated upgrades to the applcation supporting Vista and other features. Just the cost of doing that will blow your mind. Now replace that scene with a SaaS delivery of the same application over the Web. This application uses the Web as a client platform delivering better UI. The TCO is lower while the user experience is superior. I just narrated many such user experiences of Curl customers in Asia. That's why RIA customers in Japan are ahead of the US corporate awareness.

It's time, the corporate community wakes up to the RIA advantage.

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My interview with Dr. Dobb's editor Jonathan Erickson

Posted by jnan Jan 9, 2008

Dr. Dobb's magazine, primarily targeted for software development community published an interview with me today. These few questions and answers pretty well capture Curl's strength and positioning in the market place. Let me thank Bert for his help.

We expect this year 2008 to see a rapid rise in RIA adoption by the US enterprises and that will be good for the Curl RIA platform.

Jnan

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Curl Wins InfoWorld Technology of the Year for Best RIA

Posted by richard Jan 7, 2008

We learned last week from Doug Dineley, Executive Editor of the Test Center at InfoWorld that Curl was selected to win the Technology of the Year award for Best Rich Internet Applications Platform. As the awards were not to be released until today I've had to keep silent on this great news.

And so it was announced today and for all of us that have worked hard over the last year to increase awareness of Curl it is validation that Curl's RIA Plaform must be considered as an alternative in RIA implementations. This is especially true for those projects that have enterprise class performance and scalability requirements.

As Martin Heller's stated in his InfoWorld review,

"Curl may well be the most interesting computer language that you don't already know."

Now on the merit of his review and our winning the Technology-of-the-Year award we have even more ammunition with which to educate the market about the Curl. We are certainly honored to be selected and look forward to a great 2008.

Thanks to the Curl team for making such a great product and thanks to InfoWorld for recognizing it.

Richard

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Reflections - 2007

Posted by jnan Jan 3, 2008

As we get closer to the end of 2007, it's important to reflect on the progress we have made at Curl in the US market. We launched Curl formally at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last April. We should count that as the start of our US launch. We have done numerous analysts briefings to explain the positioning of Curl, in the enterprise RIA space. The result of all that effort , for example, is the latest post from Ryan Stewart's about us. This is what he said: "Flex had a great year but is it the primary technology for building RIAs? I think at this stage of the game it’s the most mature but primary is a strong word. One thing that’s happened over this year is that the field of RIAs has really blown up. We’ve got Curl, Ajax getting more advanced and Silverlight/WPF applications in the wild. It’s too tough to call Flex the primary technology."

We also saw yesterday's post by Mike Vizard of eWeek. This is what he said: "RIA is expected to be one of the hottest categories inapplication development circles this coming year thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and Adobe, but if you want to create a rich Web interface for an existing client/server application you might want to take a look at what companies such as Curl, Asperon and Nexaweb are up to these days."

During August 2007, we published a study comparing Ajax, Flex, and Curl. This study was widely discussed and I presented it at WebBuilder 2.0 two weeks ago at Las Vegas. Curl's strength as the high-end RIA platform came out loud and clear. Take a look at our new website. We introduced the RIA Knowledge center. We had our first developer day at Paisley 's (a key customer) office in Minneapolis last May. We also launched a brand new developer site.

So all in all, we have raised the awareness of Curl and as we step into 2008, the mantra is execution and customer adoption.
Happy holidays to all of you.