Curl Blog : 2008 : February

Welcome Curlers!

Posted by RMH Feb 27, 2008

Hello!

This is my first post as a member of the Curl community. It seems odd to be saying "welcome" to all of you when in fact I'm the newcomer. I hope to earn your respect and make myself useful.

My title at Curl is "VP of Developer Relations" which is a fancy way of saying "ambassador to our developers". Hopefully I can be a lot more than a messenger, however. I actually want to act as your representative so that you have someone in the executive ranks making your case and arguing for the features you want and need on this site and in the product itself. To do that, however, I need your help. Specifically, let me know what you like and don't like about the developer center and the product. We won't be able to change everything we please, but we'll have more influence on our development environment than most communities.

Curl has made some serious strategic moves to create a great community. Curl places so much importance on its development community it created an executive position to address it. That post was previously held by Marc Orchant who died last year. Marc was a great guy and its going to be a challenge trying to fill his shoes. I hope I can live up to his legacy.

Personally, I think its says a lot that Curl chose a non-executive type for an executive position. Although I've been out of the trenches for a couple years, I am, and always will be, more of a developer than a suit. (No offense to those people who do wear suits. You are nice people. Don't change a thing!) I joined Curl because I saw a great technology that needed a grass roots movement. I've been involved in a few grass roots movements in the past (e.g. Java, open source, Java EE) and I can contribute a lot to our community.

One of the first things I want to do is reach out the all you Curlers who have historically been silent and say "Welcome!". I know the developer center doesn't look very different but there is a very different vibe at the home office these days. Curl has always been responsive to its developers - the product engineers frequently answer questions on the forum - but it hasn't been very proactive. I hope to change that. We are going to implement lots of new and helpful features like giving the developer center a face lift, adding better on-line documentation, and much more. In a nutshell you are going to see a lot change and you will hopefully feel a stronger bond to the Curl community.

I'm looking forward to meeting and working with everyone in the Curl community. If you have any questions or just want to chat I'm always available at rmh@curl.com

Again, Welcome!

Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.

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Why Is an Enterprise RIA Platform Different?

Posted by richard Feb 13, 2008

Why is an Enterprise RIA Platform different? Simple - It must handle the demands of enterprise class applications.
Based on Curl's experience with large enterprise deployments at companies such as Panasonic, Toyota
and Sony we find enterprise demands are focused in the following areas:

Large datasets that demand high client-side performance;
Complicated operations that require superior user interface design;
Data visualization that requires high performance client-side graphics;
Large scale deployments with thousands of users worldwide that require performance that scales;
Complex applications that demand a development environment that scales to hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Large Datasets

Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that web application must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records. In an independent study Curl has proven to be 70% faster that Adobe Flex when loading large data sets.

Nippon Sheet Glass Co. is an example of the need for high performance. Nippon Sheet Glass is a leading provider of industrial glass products. The pricing and configuration of these glass products is highly complex. The
application handles as many as 99 different pricing scenarios with various sizes and patterns and large data sets with up to 5000 transactions with up to 10,000 items per transaction.

Superior User Interface Design

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the iPhone experience have shown that great user interface design makes a big difference. Now more than ever enterprises are realizing that user interface design can reap great returns though process improvement and employee productivity.

Using Curl a large electronics manufacturer was able reduce procurement times for their video cameras by 5 days which
amounted to a huge savings. This was possible by making previously serial processes asynchronous demanding superior
user interfaces to handle that complexity intuitively.

DataVisualization

Many enterprise applications drive timely decisions through the use of effective data visualization of complex
data. This often requires high performance rendering of complex objects.
Curl uses the native graphics capability of the client hardware for maximum performance. You can see first
hand by trying one of our demo applications that does real-time ray-tracing.

Paisley has become a recognized market leader in the fast-growing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) sector by offering
clearly superior solutions. Quality, analytics and reporting are most important in choosing a governance, risk and compliance solution. Using Curl, Paisley’s solution offers a high-performance, sophisticated reporting capability that clearly differentiates their offering. You can read the complete case study here.

Large Scale Deployments

Enterprise RIA deployments must scale to service thousands of users. With Curl much of the application processing occurs on the client which means that the server loads are much lower as the number of users increases. In many Curl enterprise deployments only a single server is required even as the application is delivered to thousands of users.

This is the case with Panasonic’s Voice of the Engineer (VOE) application. The VOE application provides comprehensive support data on Panasonic’s products for their support engineers as they help customers with product problems. The application is used by all Panasonic engineers in Japan and will soon expand to worldwide use.

Complex Applications

Many enterprise applications must deal with complex business logic, many functional elements and large numbers of screens. These complex applications often require hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The complexity of such applications can easily overwhelm development efforts using simple AJAX tools.

The Curl language combines the descriptive and active elements found in traditional web-development tools with the strength of a full-featured object-oriented programming language. The language spans the full range of requirements, from simple text markup and GUI layout to heavy-duty object-oriented computing. This means more capability is provided with fewer lines of code lowering development and maintenance costs.

Richard

0 Comments 0 References Permalink Tags: enterprise_ria, enterprise2.0, ria, curl_blog

Welcome Richard Monson-Haefel to Curl

Posted by richard Feb 4, 2008

The word is already out that Richard Monson-Haefel has decided to join the Curl team and we welcome him with open arms. Richard will be our VP of Developer Relations and responsible for growing Curl awareness and building the community of Curl developers.

As Ryan Stewart noted Richard is a great addition to the Curl team and the news has spread quickly through the developer communities.

Richard brings a wealth of experience and knowhow to the challenge of establishing Curl as THE enterprise RIA platform. He is well known in the Java developer community having won 6 awards for his programming books. Most notable among these is his book on Enterprise Java Beans which is in its 5th edition.

Richard believes as we all do that Curl is the best RIA and he is passionate about helping us create a vibrant community that can raise the awareness of Curl and elevate it to mainstream status.

We can all expect a lot more great content and activity here on the developer center once Richard starts leading our community in a couple of weeks.

Richard, welcome to the Curl community as our most distinguished Curler.