Curl Blog : June 2008

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Welcome University of Hawai'i

Posted by richard Jun 27, 2008

Yesterday we announced that the University of Hawai'i at Minoa will be using Curl in a research project called 'Anti-Keylogger for Secure Web Applications' being conducted by Professor Kazuo Sugihara. The project will examine ways to make the web experience safer by eliminating a common hacker trick of capturing keystrokes.

The students that are participating in the project have all signed up as members of the Developer Center. We extend a warm public welcome to them and we look forward to helping them learn Curl and complete their project successfully.

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When we went to the Web 2.0 Expo we wanted to bring along a couple of nice demos for the Nitro platform. One of my favorite demos was the CurlGraph application. It's a Curl Nitro applicaiton that displays your Facebook friends as a circular graph. It's very tastefully designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of
VisualComplexity.com and well implemented by our resident Curl guru, Doug McCrae. We just put out a press release on the applicaiton. We made it open source so others could take the CurlGraph and modfiy it for use in other social networks (Google OpenSocial, LinkedIn, etc.). What's cool is that you can download it to your desktop right now and use it with your own Facebook profile. Check it out and let us know what you think. Better yet, modify the source code and make it even better!

Here is the press release

http://www.curl.com/company_news062308.php


Here is the home page with instrucitons on installing and using the CurlGraph

http://developers.curl.com/docs/DOC-1241


Great job, Guys!!

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Dr. Dobbs just published an interview with David Kranz our VP of Engineering and CTO - David is one of the people that created Curl and has been involved in it since its inception in the mid 1990's. This interview focuses on his job as a software architect. The interview will be published on July 1st.

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Recently I read in a blog that the Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 Billion industry by 2013. The post also mentions the hurdles in adopting Web 2.0 technologies by the large companies. The article said:

For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:


  1. I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as "consumer-grade" technology
  2. Ad-supported web tools generally have "free" as the starting point
  3. Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments

As I have said before, the fastest way for Web 2.0 adoption will be via RIA (rather than the more popular ones such as wikis, blogs, tags, mashups, and social networks). RIA is the low hanging fruit where users get an enriched experience compared to the client-server implementations of yesteryears. The TCO (Total Cost Of Ownership) of RIA is also compelling.

Why do I say this?


Let me give you five examples of "actual RIA applications in use" by very large global companies using Curl RIA platform. This follows my post few weeks ago on the key requirements for enterprise RIA.


Example 1 - Voice of the Engineers (VOE) - Large electronics manufacturer built a real time application to link the field input to parts repair information. This application provides rich graphical interface to visualize suspected points of failure. Executives can also get aggregate information on failure trends over time (classic BI). Benefits are quantified in several hundreds of thousands of dollars of cost saving in the first year of implementation.


Example 2 - Heatmaps - Significant company in the GRC (Governance, Risk, Compliance) space offers a Curl-based RIA to its customers. Grid-like UI offers a view of various business units that pass or fail compliance. They call this the Heatmap. As you mouse over to the red cell (showing compliance failure), further details are revealed as to why. The company claims this specific visualization is the big competitive differentiation for them. They are growing briskly at 40% year to year in this space.


Example 3 - Procurement - A large international company (household name) in the electronics manufacturing business built a procurement system using Curl front-end technology with Oracle DBMS and J2EE backend. The systems has been in operation or 3 years with over 300 users. Very large data volumes with fast performance was the key need. Benefits are quantified as 50% reduction in cycle time compared to the same under the legacy client-server system.


Example 4 - Consolidated Billing - Large telecommunications company built a consolidated billing system (for landline, VOIP, long distance, cell phone) for corporate clients. The old system was built using Visual Basic and bills were sent via CD's causing delay in data upload and services. The new system uses Curl in the client-side and Oracle in the backend. Currently 10,000 clients use the system, likely to grow to 15,000 next year. The entire application was developed within a year on a budget of $1M. Benefits include 10% in cost savings with increased accuracy of data.


Example 5 - Insurance planning for agency - Large insurance company offers this web-based application for agents. It can simulate customer's financial's, trying various policies of the plan and provides visual results with graphical charts for easy understanding. This new Curl-based system replaced the old Visual Basic system. The client states the benefits as: easy maintainability, better security, better performance and no data latency.


There are many more such examples from Curl's 300 plus large enterprise clients.


Hence we humbly claim Curl to be the defacto leader in Enterprise RIA space.

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How big is your source code?

Posted by RMH Jun 12, 2008

Maurizioi Storani wrote an excellent blog post about his first impressions using JavaFX's new GUI API (javafx.gui) titled "JavaFX (James Weaver)". That post shows a simple example of JavaFX code using the new javafx.gui library. Out of curiosity I asked Doug McCrae, a Curl engineer, to write up the same exact program in Curl. It turns out that Curl code looks a bit shorter than the JavaFX code. Anyway I thought it would be fun to see if other bloggers would be willing to post the code for their favorite RIA technology. It's a pretty short program and very GUI centric, but its a fun to compare solutions all the same.

If you have never used Curl before you'll find that running the Curl application is easy. Copy and past code below into a text file and save it as "helloGoodbye.dcurl" to your desktop. Then download and install the Curl RTE. Once the RTE is installed, run the Curl application by simply double clicking on it. It will look almost exactly the same as the JavaFX code that Maurizioi created.



{curl 6.0, 7.0 applet}
 
{value
   def content = {Frame}
 
   {View title = "Hello, Goodbye",
       width = 400px, height = 300px,
       visibility = "normal",
       background = "#DDF",
       {on WindowClose do
           {exit}
       },
       {VBox
           margin = 6px, font-size = 36px,
           halign = "center",
           width = {make-elastic},
           {vcenter content},
           {HBox spacing = 6px,
               {CommandButton label = "Hello",
                   {on Action do
                       {content.add "You say hello...", replace? = true}
                   }
               },
               {CommandButton label = "Goodbye",
                   {on Action do
                       {content.add "and I say goodbye", replace? = true}
                   }
               }
           }
       }
   }
}
 


I don't recommend running the code I posted on Maurizioi blog because the commenting feature removed all the white space so it doesn't work. Also the one attached is even shorter than the one posted to Maurizioi's blog.

Note: Code has been modified since original post to take out errors introduced by formatting and also to make the code more readable.

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The Eclipse IDE for Curl!

Posted by RMH Jun 9, 2008

We just announced that the Curl Development tools for Eclipse (CDE) is available in beta! The CDE beta is a milestone in the general migration of all our tools to the Eclipse platform. You can still use the Curl IDE, which is written entierly in Curl and is excellent, but if you are an Eclipse user you can now develop applications in Eclipse 3.3 or later. The reason we are moving to Eclipse is pretty simple: Eclipse dominates the IDE market and has a huge ecosystem. Moving Curl development to Eclipse allows you to leverage hundreds of other tools built specifically for Eclipse and allows us to better serve the Eclipse market of developers.

If you prefer the Curl IDE than please stick with that, but if you are interested in learning how to use Eclipse or if you already use Eclipse than give the Curl Development tools for Eclipse a whirl - I think you'll find that they are excellent. You can send feedback about bugs (there will probably be a few as this is a beta) directly to Curl's engineers at cde_beta 'att' curl.com. If you are having trouble using the Eclipse Curl development enviorment you can post questions to ask-the-expert and we will respond as quickly as we can. We want the beta to be a success and in order for that to happen we need you to help us build a great product. Download the CDE (Curl Development tools for Eclipse) today and tell us what you think!

You can access the CDE here - it includes all the Eclipse plug-ins you need and documentation. Have fun!!


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I've posted the CurlGraph Nitro sample application. Its described in the

Curl Nitro Sample Application: CurlGraph

article in our Widgets/Gadgets/Curlets section.

It visualizes part of the facebook social graph. We used it as a demo at the Web 2.0 Expo this April. The application installs an entry on your Start menu and can also install a desktop icon so you can easily start it up. It can run online or offline and it runs in safe mode inside the Curl sandbox, so you don't have to give it full access to your machine.

The full source code for the application is attached, so you can extend it further.

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Feedback about the performance comparison between Curl and ActionScript has focused more on the importance of JPEG encoding than on the importance of high performance in a rich client language.

There have been a number of comments indicating that JPEG encoding is indeed useful in some rich client applications, enough to prompt discussion about whether it could be built into the FlashPlayer (where, presumably, it would not be coded in ActionScript).

However, image processing is just one example of an application genre where substantial application specific processing is important. Others include business intelligence, financial analysis, simulation, and product configuration. Speculation about the potential and implications of high performance language alternatives is beginning.

When considering performance, its important to distinguish between the performance of components that are built into the platform, and the performance of components developed specifically for one application. For example, the guimark test is intended to exercise the platform, not its language. From the theory page: "Code execution should have a negligible impact. The user code in each of the tests has almost zero impact on the test case"

We chose the JPEG encoding task to focus on the opposite end of the spectrum: exercising user code. The JPEG task is well suited for comparing language performance, because it has very little reliance on library functions, which might well be written in a different language. Furthermore, the operations used doing JPEG encoding (iteration, floating point math, memory allocation, object creation, method and function calls) are used in a wide range of applications.

Of course, every application uses a different combination of language and platform features, so generalization from any particular test to a specific use case must be done carefully. RIA language performance is most relevant for applications where a significant part of the application logic is compute intensive.

The distribution of processing between tiers will vary according to the nature of the application, but one wants such decisions to be based on application characteristics (data flow and work flow) rather than on intrinsic limitations of the client platform.

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Curl for Mac OS X!

Posted by RMH Jun 3, 2008

Curl announced today that we are out of beta and shipping a full release of the RTE for the Mac OS X! And not just the Intel version but the PowerPC version as well!

As a Mac user myself I'm pretty excited about this because it seems obvious to me that the Mac is making strong in-roads at the Enterprise. Within the next 10 years the desktop will be pretty evenly devided, in terms of market share, between Windows, Mac and Linux. People will be much less concerned with the type of operating systems than with the type of runtime. Today there are a couple of runtimes that appear to have a bright future: Curl (of course), Adobe AIR, and Silverlight (when it migrates from RIA to desktop). There are, of course, others such as Google Gears and Mozilla Prism and they may also survive but my bets are on the three amigos: Curl, Air, & Silverlight. I talk more about the deminishing importance of the desktop operating systems and the rise of the fit client platforms in the article The Next Battle for the Desktop. Kudos to the Curl engineers for making this happen!!

The full press release is here.

You can download the Mac RTE from here.

+ As a clarification this is the RTE not the IDE - we may make the IDE available for the Mac in the future but for no its supported on Windows and Linux. +

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