Monday Curl Inc. sent out a press release announcing our next version of Curl code named Curl Nitro. Nitro is an extension to Curl 6.0 that expands Curl from a RIA platform constrained to the browser to a Desktop platform. If you have heard of Adobe AIR then Curl is to some degree the similar but Curl Nitro has many advantages over Adobe AIR. For example, Curl Nitro's security model on the desktop is fully sandboxed so that Curl Desktop Applets by default have access only to a quarantined section of the diskspace where developers and write and store data directly to the disk either as files or in a SQLite database. Curl Nitro also works off-line as well as it does on-line. All this should sound familiar to folks who have used Curl 6.0 OCC capabilities - Curl Nitro works hard to enhance and expose those capabilities that have been a part of Curl since the beginning. In addition, Curl Nitro is much, much faster in terms of process performance than Adobe AIR, Ajax, and other RIA platforms.
You can learn a lot more about Curl Nitro by visiting our new Nitro web page, so I won't go into too many details here. The point is that Curl Nitro expands the Curl platform so that it is not only the best RIA technology for the enterprise its also the best desktop technology for the enterprise. We have some cool demo applications we'll be showing at the Web 2.0 Expo this week and that we will soon put up on our web site. These are what we call "take away demos" they will be open sourced (as soon as we clean up the code) and free to everyone. More details on those demos will be announced soon.
You will notice that Curl is becoming much more aggressive about its marketing. We believe strongly that Curl Nitro is superior to any other RIA or desktop-RIA platform available today and we are not going to be shy about it. You'll see us talking a lot about the strengths of Curl Nitro compared to other products and, when we feel its necessary, exposing the limitations of our competitors compared to Curl Nitro. The days when Curl is a wallflower in the market are over. We are going to get out there and help people understand why so many enterprise developers love Curl.
I am having some minor issues on Win XP with the Curl processes hanging around after shutdown ... other than that it is great to see the changes in the look and feel of the RTE's interface
I have to experiment now with the built-in styles facility