Today I would like to announce that Robert Shiplett is second Curler (aka Curlr) to receive the Curl MVP award. Robert is a lead developer at Paisley working full-time as a Curl developer on their Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) product.

Robert is a programming language aficionado who has, in addition to Curl, worked in Smalltalk, Prolog, APL, and C. He is also a fan of other programming languages including Rebol, SNOBOL, UNICON, IO, and Oz. Robert Shiplett, whose first love is Prolog, professes that he is not a Curl zealot, but a Curl fan. That’s high praise coming from a developer who has learned to use so many programming languages.

In his own words Robert told me:

“… as an expression-based language suited to managing content in web applications, it is difficult to rival Curl - especially for Web-based training. And difficult to rival as an IDE (my other favorite languages have no such IDE ).”

Although Robert spends some of his off time scribbling code in SNOBOL 4 on paper at the dinning room table he also interested in the electric guitar (he has 2 of them), telescopes (he has 13 of those), PC flight simulators (he has all of them), R/C planes, languages (French & German), foreign films, poetry, and playing GO, Chess, and Scrabble.

We are excited to add Robert to the small but growing ranks of MVPs, a status which is very well deserved for what has been a great deal of evangelizing on his part. You will see Robert posting often on the developers center - don’t hesitate to congratulation him! You can read more about Robert’s thoughts on Curl and other topics at his blog “eclectic pencil”.

Congratulations Robert!

About the Curl MVP program:

Throughout the year a few exceptional Curl community members will be awarded MVP status. This is in recognition of those individuals who have made substantial contributions to the Curl community and deserve to be recognized for those efforts. 

The first MVP award was given to Friedger Müffke which you can read about here.

The advantages of being an MVP are many-fold including recognition, elevated status in the community, promotion by Curl, instant beta access, and MVP Board membership. The MVP Board will consult with Curl on a semi-annual basis and have influence on Curl's product direction in the future. MVPs represent a critical feedback channel to the community. It’s at the MVP Board meetings that MVPs also will consider nominations for other MVPs and vote to give those awards to deserving community members.



A Curl MVP is someone who has worked hard in the community to help others, spread the word about Curl through speaking, books and articles, and has contributed to the health and vitality of our community. When the award is given it should be of no surprise to the rest of us – MVPs stand out.



The Curl MVP award is recognition of an individual for having furthered Curl as a platform for Rich Internet Applications. In nearly all cases MVPs have given up their free time to help other community members succeed, which is the very foundation on which our community must be built; helping others to succeed with Curl.

A recent Forrester research paper by Stefan Ried examines how new RIA Ajax based applications are being accepted in the business community.

Stefan notes that "a great user experience is one of the most compelling and important characteristics of a modern business application." As Ajax based business applications are becoming more common his research shows that their interfaces tend to frustrate powers users. Power users are used to high performance extremely interactive client-server applications and are easily frustrated by Ajax based applications.

Stefan details a list of Ajax's shortcomings as a platform for enterprise business applications. These include slow performance, inability to deal with large complex displays and inconsistency between browser platforms.

To all you Ajax folks who have experienced these shortcomings first hand, you should check out Curl! Curl offers the high performance of client-server applications, easily handles complex displays with large datasets and runs on Windows, Linux , Mac.

Richard

Throughout the year a few exceptional Curl community members will be awarded MVP status. This is in recognition of those individuals who have made substantial contributions to the Curl community and deserve to be recognized for those efforts.

The advantages of being an MVP are many-fold including recognition, elevated status in the community, promotion by Curl, instant beta access, and MVP Board membership. The MVP Board will consult with Curl on a semi-annual basis and have influence on Curl's product direction in the future. MVPs represent a critical feedback channel to the community. It’s at the MVP Board meetings that MVPs also will consider nominations for other MVPs and vote to give those awards to deserving community members.

A Curl MVP is someone who has worked hard in the community to help others, spread the word about Curl through speaking, books and articles, and has contributed to the health and vitality of our community. When the award is given it should be of no surprise to the rest of us – MVPs stand out.

The Curl MVP award is recognition of an individual for having furthered Curl as a platform for Rich Internet Applications. In nearly all cases MVPs have given up their free time to help other community members succeed, which is the very foundation on which our community must be built; helping others to succeed with Curl.

For Curl, Inc. Identifying the first MVP award winner was pretty easy; it goes to Friedger Müffke from Belgium. Friedger was introduced to Curl five years ago when his mother handed him a computer magazine that included coverage the first Curl Programming Contest which took place in 2003 (we hope to have more contests in the future). Friedger learned the Curl platform and has been a supporter and active community member ever since. He wrote a Dr. Dobbs magazine article on Curl, worked on a German language book on Curl (not currently available), and worked on curlbreaker.com a Curl enthusiasts site. You will see Friedger posting and answer questions on our forums – he exemplifies what it means to be a Curl MVP.

Congratulations Friedger! You are the first person awarded MVP status in the Curl community!

Hello Curlers!

On Tuesday we will announce the release of the Curl Web Services Development Kit - WSDK. Yesterday I briefed Paul Krill of InfoWorld on the announcement and he wrote this article.

This announcement is significant to Curl for a couple of reasons.

• This is our first Open Source product. - Back in October of last year we contributed 3 components to Open Source. This was the first step in our open source strategy. We will continue to contribute key components of the product that help support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs to Open Source . Now we have completed the integration and testing of the Curl WSDK and will offer it as a fully supported component of our RIA Platform.

• The WSDK links Curl RIA applications directly to SOA - As enterprises continue to execute on their SOA strategy they are increasingly seeing the need to present and visualize large complex data sets on the client. Untill recently complex business processing and data manipulation has been a server side task. Now with RIAs more processing can happen on the client enabling much more responsive and dynamic applications. The WSDK provides the functions to enable direct connection to SOA back-end data.

The WSDK provides a simple way to use web services directly in Curl applications. You are can obtain information resources from a Service Oriented Architecture though SOAP and WSDL, or from a Resource Oriented Architecture though REST and XML.

SOAP Web Services described using WSDL are processed by the WSDK and converted directly into Curl packages and class definitions, which can be used just like any other Curl application component. The service definitions can be processed programmatically, or using a tool in the Curl IDE.

Additionally the WSDK XML Document Model (XDM) provides functionality for processing XML data in Curl: reading, creating, modifying and writing XML documents. XML document contents are represented as a hierarchy of Curl objects. The objects can be accessed using methods and by XPath expressions. They can be displayed, transformed into other Curl representations, and used as a basis for data binding.

In traditional Web environments, Web services and resources are usually consumed by other Web servers. The full potential of web data can be realized using Curl’s rich client environment. Curl clients can directly consume Web services since the Web service technology stack is embedded in the runtime platform. This allows for dynamic presentation and direct interaction with the information resources.

Richard