What makes Curl such a great programming platform? Here are seven things.
Single Platform: The Curl RTE is the same on every platform, in any browser. No need to work around browser quirks and bugs.
Security: Curl has a security model that prevents unprivileged applets from doing arbitrary things on your computer. For safety's sake, we think that most applets should be unprivileged. For commonly needed but potentially insecure operations, such as reading or writing a file, the RTE will ask the user for permission before allowing the operation. This is better than always preventing it and also better than not allowing it at all. It is of course possible to grant applets full privileges, but it's not a step to be taken lightly.
Software Engineering: Curl is the kind of language you want if you are serious about software engineering. Strong type checking is enforced, though you can declare a variable to be of type "any". The language supports multiple inheritence. It has parameterized types (generic classes), as well user defined macros. It doesn't force you to put everything into a class. Development is fast too, because of the large number of useful APIs provided and because the compile time type checking helps you eliminate errors early. Plus when debugging, you don't have to "build" anything. Just edit and reload in the browser.
Single Language: The Curl language is suitable for all of the things that go into a modern web application: Classes, algorithms, data, expressions, events and handlers, text, graphics, forms, tables, and everything else can be expressed in the same language. You don't need to use a messy combination of XML, JavaScript, HTML, ActionScript, and various other languages and formats.
Server deployed: A Curl applet is distributed simply by putting it on a web server. It is updated by updating the files on the web server. It can be is as easy as updating a static web site.
Service Oriented: A Curl applet is the ideal consumer for web services and API's. Any SOAP endpoint can be turned into a Curl package and called directly. REST API's can also be easily handled. Both synchronous and asynchronous requests are supported.
We'll be talking more about these and other advantages of the Curl platform over the next few weeks. Let us know if any of them is of particular interest.
If you're a web developer, download the free IDE (which also installs the RTE if needed) and give Curl a try. You can use Curl for any programming project, even if you aren't planning to deploy it on the web. If you need to do any kind of computation and user interaction, Curl makes it easy. There are extensive examples in the Developer's Guide to get you started.
Great post, Mike! Curl sounds pretty cool when talk about the seven things that make such a great platform. Thanks!