Curl Blog

Sales Dashboard: A Sample Curl Nitro Desktop Application

cheese — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:06:31 GMT

I have posted the Sales Dashboard Nitro sample application. It is described in the

Curl Nitro Sample Application: Sales Dashboard

article in our Widgets/Gadgets/Curlets section.

The Curl Sales Dashboard demonstration is a Curl implementation of a sales dashboard designed by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. We used it as a demo at the Web 2.0 Expo this past 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 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.

RMH was kind enough to create a video demonstrating the installation and use of the Sales Dashboard. You can view the video here: Sales Dashboard video

Mid-year Update on Curl Inc.

jnan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:26:00 GMT

As we are enjoying the last few weeks of summer, I’d like to take time to share with you an update on Curl’s business and the enterprise RIA market in general.

Overall, 2008 has been an exciting year for us. We’ve made some great strides in further developing our product set as well as expanding our business. We productized two of our three
open source projects, executed on our Eclipse strategy, and released our Run Time Environment (RTE) for the Macintosh, as well as support for Ubuntu.

Also, we unveiled Curl Nitro, the next version of our RIA platform, which brought with it enhanced desktop capabilities to enterprises. We released a few really cool sample applications to showcase the data visualization and online/offline capabilities of that product, so I highly recommend you check them out.

At the beginning of 2008, we predicted that this would be the start of an explosion of enterprise RIA, and this has truly been the case so far. The market is heating up with vendors, while companies and consumers alike demand richer user interfaces, stronger security, and higher performance. The enterprise has really felt the push, and we are right there to support them with thefeatures they need. This increase in demand also is reflected in the growth of our developer community, as we experienced an increase here of 456 percent.

In particular, as I have been meeting with customers and prospects, here are the common themes I have heard from them:

- Curl's visualization functions plus high performance gives us a competitive edge in our business.

- "Curlization" is a process to replace spreadsheet-based client-serverapplications to RIAs with lower total cost of ownership.

- Curl is ahead of Adobe Flex in several areas like security, performance, and programmer productivity.

- Curl has a proven track record as a RIA platform for enterprises, while others are just starting.

Below I have included a snapshot of the news announcements we have issued during the last several months, a sampling of the great media coverage we’ve received, and links to some of our most interesting blog entries from the Curl Developer Center for you to reference. I hope you find this update helpful in your research, and I welcome any comments or questions you might have.

News
ANNOUNCEMENTS
· Curl Releases New Web-Based Training Courses, August 20, 2008
· Curl Announces General Availability of Curl Development Tools for Eclipse, August 5, 2008
· Curl Announces General Availability of Its Curl Data Kit - July 7, 2008
· Curl to Provide Rich Internet Application Technology to University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, June 26, 2008
· Curl Nitro Demo Application Visualizes Facebook Social Graphs, June 23, 2008
· Curl Showcases Curl Nitro Through New Sample Application, June 16, 2008
· Curl Announces Public Beta Availability of Eclipse-Based RIA Development Tools, June 9, 2008
· Curl Makes Rich Internet Application Run Time Environment for Macintosh Generally Available, June 3, 2008
· RIA Technology Benchmark Test Finds Curl Outperforms Adobe Flex 3, May 28, 2008
· Curl Embraces Desktop RIA With 'Nitro' Product Release, April 21, 2008
· Curl Announces Support for Ubuntu for Enterprise RIA Platform, April 15, 2008
· Curl Joins Eclipse Foundation and Announces Eclipse Strategy, April 7, 2008
· Curl Delivers First Open Source Product with Web Services Development Kit, March 4, 2008

CURl IN the news
· RIA company curls up with Eclipse, SD Times, August 6, 2008
· Curl completes embrace of Eclipse IDE, NetworkWorld, August 4, 2008
· How to sort out Ajax and RIA frameworks, SearchSOA.com, July 30, 2008
· The Architect's Role, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, July 1, 2008
· Overview of the Curl Enterprise RIA Platform, InfoQ.com, June 13, 2008
· Curl Adds Runtime Support for Mac Environments, PC World, June 3, 2008
· Curl 6 outperforms Flex 3 on CPU-intensive benchmark, InfoWorld, May 28, 2008
· Who Will Win the Next Battle for the Desktop?, AJAXWorld, April 27, 2008
· Curl's Nitro Takes Aim at Adobe AIR, InformationWeek, April 15, 2008
· RIA War Is Brewing, eWeek, April 11, 2008
· Product review: Curl 6.0 enriches the rich Internet toolkit, InfoWorld, April 7, 2008
· Curl: Rich Internet Apps get richer, Computerworld, March 13, 2008
· Curl ships commercial version of its open source web services dev kit for RIA Platform, ZDNet, March 4, 2008
· Curl linking rich Internet applications, SOA, InfoWorld, February 29, 2008

CURl BLOG POSTS
· Curl is now in the Top 4, August 12, 2008
· Backward Compatibility and Curl, August 1, 2008
· Quarantined by default, secure by design, July 28, 2008
· The Batmobile, Lamborghini, and my Suburban, July 23, 2008
· Enterprise RIA - real examples in use, June 13, 2008
· How big is your source code?, June 12, 2008
· Does RIA platform performance matter?, May 30, 2008
· For Curl, Security is Job #1, May 29, 2008
· Questions to ask your RIA Vendor, May 20, 2008
· Why Criminal Hackers Will Love Adobe AIR, April 16, 2008
· Seven nice things about the Curl Platform, March 25, 2008
· Why Is an Enterprise RIA Platform Different?, February 13, 2008

Events Tradeshows and Conferences
Curl will have representation and/or executive speaking sessions at the following tradeshows. Please let us know if you plan to attend any of these events and if you’re interested in scheduling a briefing:

· Rich Client Experience, Washington, DC, September 4-5, 2008
· Web 2.0 Conference & Expo 2008, New York City, Sept. 16-19, 2008
· AJAXWorld 2008 West,San Jose, CA, October 20-22, 2008
· SD Best hPractices,Boston, MA, October 27-30, 2008
· InfoQ QCon, San Francisco, CA, November 19 - 21, 2008

Why CIO's think their application developers are clueless?

jnan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:34:56 GMT

CIO magazine has published an article on the reasons why CIO's think their developers are clueless.This is based on a survey of CIO's.

Reason number 1 says - Developers don't think practically.

Reason number 3 says - Developers can't get away from the "wow" factor. One CIO is quoted saying, "An application with fewer features that is completely stable and fast
is better than a full-featured application that is unreliable and
slow."

Reason number 4 says - Developers don't think of ROI, TCO, and other business priorities.

This is relevant to the RIA business, where we see how our Japanese customers are successful in deploying RIA via Curl Platform, because of reliability, scalability, and performance. These customers start from a TCO and ROI perspective.

In the US, the "wow" factor seems to dominate the landscape. Sometimes, customers endorse a technology such as Flex and then try to figure out how best to use it. CIO's must take the lead in setting out a vision and blueprint, before developers can execute. A disconnect creates much confusion.

I have posted a comment on the article.

Rich Internet Applications Death Match!

RMH — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:09:40 GMT

Rob Gonda has proposed a RIA panel discussion that will pit panelists from Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Curl and other RIA platforms against each other to the death! Ok, maybe not to the death but it should be interesting all the same! The panel discussion, titled "Rich Internet Applications Death Match" is proposed for the SXSW Interactive Festival scheduled in March of 2009. We would really like to see this panel happen but its up to you to decide. I encourage everyone in our community to go to the Interactive Panel Picker at the SXSW conference web site and vote for this discussion. It will be a great opportunity to compare and contrast the different RIA platforms and for everyone to learn more about Curl!

Professional Web Based Training Courses in Curl for Free!

RMH — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 02:27:28 GMT

Curl, Inc. is excited to announce to our community that we have made a set of extensive professional Web Based Training (WBT) courses available to all Curl Developer Center members for free. These materials have been used by Curl to train developers both over the web and in the class room. There are three courses: Curl Fundamentals, Visual Layout Editor, and Application Development, all of which provide easy to follow succinct explanations of how to write programs in Curl with plenty of examples and even workspace where you can write Curl code directly into your browser and see it execute - no IDE required!

Visit the Training Center - Members Training section to access these courses. If you are not a member you'll need to join first, but it's easy and also free. Just click here to join!

The courses are easy to use but to help folks get started right away we've prepared a five minute video that explains how to use the WBT. Watch the video and get started today! (click in the middle of the blurred image to see the video)

Curl is now in the Top 4

RMH — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:42:24 GMT

It's been rewarding watching the Curl customer base grow and seeing its adoption gaining more speed as each month passes by. When people talk about the leading RIA solutions (i.e. Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX) you will almost always here them talk about Curl as well. For example, in eWeek last week (print edition only) Darryl Taft listed Curl ( along with Adobe Flash and AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun JavaFX and Mozilla Prism) as leading the pack among top competitors in the RIA space. The RIA community understands that Curl is a powerful solution for the enterprise and a top contender in the RIA market place.

Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE) is now Available!

RMH — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:13:45 GMT

At long last and after an herculean effort by our engineering team, we are proud to tell you that we have released the Curl CDE! The new Eclipse-based Curl IDE is really cool and for someone who is already familiar with Eclipse it will be a big step up. Our other Curl IDE, which is written entirely in Curl, will continue to be maintained for the foreseeable future but new capabilities and features will be added to the Curl CDE only. The Curl CDE is the future for our development community. It was chosen because the Eclipse platform is the platform used predominately by our customers and our customers want Curl to plug-in to that environment. We also benefit from the huge ecosystem surrounding Curl. We don't have to invent every new feature but can leverage existing Eclipse plug-ins. It's all good!

If you want to get started using the new Eclipsed-based Curl IDE (Curl CDE) you can download it from our web site now - this is the final release not a beta.
Download the Curl CDE

You should make sure before you download the Curl CDE that you follow the Installation Notes - there is a little bit of footwork required to get the plug-in working as is typical of Eclipse plug-ins.
Read the Installation Notes

If you have questions about how to use the Curl CDE there is documentation available directly from the CDE and you can also use the "Ask-the-Expert" forum. Remember: In the Curl forum there are no stupid questions and there are no stupid answers! Ask any Curl related question you want and it will be answered as quickly as possible.
Ask-the-Expert Forum

Backward Compatability and Curl

RMH — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:05:27 GMT

In an article I wrote for InsideRIA I asked "is backward compatibility important for a RIA platform". Curl doesn't build its runtimes to be "guaranteed" to be backward compatable - we use a different approach which we believe is better for our product and our customers. I spoke with David Kranz and Bert Halstead and got more details from them. The following is derived from emails from both those folks and should provide you with more details about Curl's backward compatibility story.

According to Bert and David:

There are several issues that are wrapped up in the notion of "backward compatibility" with regard to a platform, as opposed to an application. One is what happens when a user upgrades the platform. What happens to the existing applications running on that platform? We hope the answer is that they keep running. This can be accomplished in one of two ways.

One common way is that the new version of the platform replaces the old version and that the new version cannot change the existing behavior. This is the way browser-based platforms generally work, as well as operating system upgrades. This makes it difficult for a platform to evolve and also places a huge testing burden on the platform. And since it is so hard to achieve true, 100% compatibility, it also forces application developers with mission-critical applications to constantly make sure their applications work on new versions of the platform their application uses because a new version may be installed "underneath" the application, possibly causing it to break. Moreover, none of the other platforms are fully backward compatible -- Adobe has made various changes in ActionScript, Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 are very different, if Java ever removes any of the deprecated APIs, like they say they will, then it won't be backward compatible either," etc. So promising backward compatablity and executing on the promise are two different things.

The other way to make sure that applications developed for older versions of a platform keep running is "side-by-side" versioning. This is the approach taken by platforms such as Visual Basic, and Curl. In this case an application is built to run on a particular version. When the user installs a new version, they do not replace the older one. Until they are upgraded, old applications use the old version of the platform and so are sure to keep working. New and older applications both continue to work. One advantage of this approach is that developers do not have to worry about how their application runs on new versions of the platform until they want to upgrade.
Another advantage is that the platform is not required to be 100% compatible.

Of course, any incompatible change is a potential burden to developers and should be avoided unless developers are provided with important functionality in exchange for possibly having to make some code changes when they upgrade. Curl's policy, which is to evolve APIs, even from one major version to the next, in a backward-compatible way whenever there is any reasonable way to do it.

For an enterprise, our approach to "side-by-side" versioning is a big advantage or the enterprise. It allows an unterprise be able to run applications without upgrading for as long as they want, and not have to suffer a forced upgrade of all of their applications just because they have some new application they want to use. It is also a big advantage to be using a platform that can evolve without the burden of having to make sure that all existing applications running on the platform behave in exactly the same way with the new versions.

Quarantined by default, secure by design

RMH — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:15:09 GMT

I�m constantly amazed at the inventiveness and persistence of hackers at creating and distributing virus, worms, fishing attacks, etc. Isn�t amazing that we are still so easily victimized by these scoundrels? The other day I was looking for software that can rip movies off of my DVDs and put them on my iPhone. When searching Google I found literally dozens of programs that promise to do this. I asked a friend, which program I should try and his reply was, �don�t try any of them.� Apparently many of these free and handy utilities are actually Trojan Horses designed to give you the impression of usefulness while infecting your machine with all sorts of nasty critters. How do they do it? They install natively on your machine so that once installed they have access to your entire system including writing root kits.

This is the dilemma: There are a lot of really great and useful applications out there in the wild but there are also a lot of horrible, wicked applications just waiting to be given access to your system. What should we do? I�m a firm believer that the answer lies in quarantining applications from the start so that they can never access resources outside of a specific directory on your hard drive. This is exactly what Curl does by default; it quarantines the Curl applets you download to a specific directory. It�s actually much better than other RIA solutions because, by default, a Curl applet from the wild can have access to substantial amount of secondary and primary memory. A Curl application that is not signed by a valid certificate of authority cannot access any resources beyond the directory you run it out of. Combine this with the network security access file that was first developed by Curl and is now used by Adobe (their own version of it that is) and you have an outstanding security model.

What does this mean? It means you can download any application you want without concern about having your Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop hacked. Applications cannot access operating system resources beyond their quarantined directory and are therefor far safer than any native application. And because they can access disk space beyond a few kilobytes they can store a decent amount of off line data and are a lot more useful.

Imagine if most, if not all, applications were designed to run in a Curl-like quarantine. The Internet would, in my opinion, be a much safer source place.

A frank discussion about RIA with Forrester

RMH — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:24:09 GMT

Recently, I interviewed Principal Analyst Ron Rogowski of Forrester Research about the state of RIA technology today. In a five episode pod-cast available hereI asked Ron if RIA is making headway in the enterprise and his opinions about the future of the "Fit Client", enterprise widgets, Ajax, and client-side platforms in general. Ron provides a unique perspective that is both independent and well considered. Check out the the pod caststoday and see what Forrester has to say about the RIA industry. (Note: the first minute and six seconds repeats in each podcast) ..

<font face="Arial, s

The Batmobile, Lamborghini, and my Suburban

RMH — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:45:12 GMT

I went out last night and caught the late showing of The Dark Night. I love that Batmobile, but I can’t imagine driving it to work. I would rather drive Bruce Wayne’s Lamborghini! But even the Lamborghini is not exactly a utilitarian vehicle. I mean I can’t imagine taking my wife and four kids on a camping trip in a Lamborghini. I would rather drive my Chevy Suburban.

The Batmobile, Lamborghini and the Suburban all have strengths and weakness depending on the context in which they are used. The fact is you have to choose the right vehicle for the job at hand. This is also true of RIA platforms.

Let say you have to enrich the user experience of a commercial shopping site like Amazon.com or The Gap. You are probably going to use something fairly lightweight like Ajax. On the other hand, if you want to provide a beautiful animation for Disney you’ll use Flex or Silverlight, not Ajax. Flex might be good for one site and Silverlight another. Ajax framework “X” here and Ajax framework “Y” there. You get the picture.

My platform of choice is Curl, a RIA platform that started as a DARPA funded research project at MIT more than a decade ago. As a RIA platform Curl is very mature and extremely powerful, but it’s not appropriate for all use cases. For example, I wouldn’t build a mass consumer web site with Curl because the Curl runtime is not very common. I would use Ajax or Flex instead. At the same time I wouldn’t build a processing intensive data visualization tool or an advanced product configuration interface (think thousands of parts) using Ajax or Flex either. I would use Curl.

Curl is a powerhouse; it is the Batmobile of the RIA platforms. But its most appropriate for enterprise and scientific computing - its not always the best choice for mass consumer applications. For mass consumer applications I would choose Flex, Silverlight or Ajax - these are the Lamborghinis and Suburbans of the RIA platforms. Flex, Silverlight and Ajax are best suited, in my opinion, for every day use (Suburban) or for glitz and glam (Lamborghini), not for mission critical industrial strength jobs (Batmobile). For mission critical industrial strength jobs that require intensive processing and the ability to handle huge data sets I choose Curl.

When you choose a RIA platform you have to consider many things and in many cases Ajax, Flash/Flex, or Silverlight will do the job nicely. But there are occasions when you need something much more powerful and that’s when you should take a serious look at Curl. Don’t drive the Batmobile to work and don’t drive the Suburban into a battle with evil. Use the right platform for the job.

2009: The Year of Enterprise RIA

RMH — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:59:21 GMT

Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con just published a great interview with Jnan Dash the Chief Strategy Officer at Curl. It provides insights into why 2009 will the be year of Enterprise RIA as well as providing insights on why Curl is a better enterprise solution and what organizations need to do to get Enterprise 2.0 - ability.

Jnan Dash is one of those guys who know everyone, sits on multiple corporate boards, has been in IT for over 30 years, and has worked on some of the seminal technologies in our industry. You can learn more about Jnan here and read the interview here.

Curl - a gentle slope language.

Kamal — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 17:12:43 GMT

I just added an example in our resource center that shows that Curl is a gentle slope language. It is a markup, procedural, scripting and an object oriented language.

To demonstarte it I choose to draw a UPC bar code. Note that in the code I have used flowing text, markup, procedures and objects. This example shows how these things can all be done so seamlessly in Curl.

I have implemented the UPC bar code using two techniques. The first technique uses Rule objects to draw the bars of the bar code. The second technique is more efficient but needs more expertise. It uses the rendering APIs to render the bars of the bar code.

Example: Gentle Slope.

RedMonk's RIA Weekly Podcast covering Curl

jnan — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 22:00:22 GMT

I just finished listening to RedMonk's weekly PodCast on RIA. Our own Richard Monson-Haefel participated along with Ryan Stewart of Adobe.

Richard did a great job answering many questions including comments on Curl's origin as an MIT Research Project before the start of this decade. Curl Inc., the commercial company, brought out its first product back in 2002 during the difficult time of dot-com bust. Subsequently the Japanese company SCS (Sumisho Computer Systems) acquired it back in 2004 and stayed focused in the Japanese market for 3 years. The result was rapid growth there in several global enterprises (with house-hold names) jumping into the enterprise RIA solution far ahead of their US counterparts.

To a question on an application example, Richard mentioned the deployment at Paisley (Heatmaps) and also at a SaaS delivery of a construction-grade glass company in Japan. The discussion also gets into the need for client-side compilation, specific needs for the enterprise over the consumer kind of applications, etc.

Do listen to it when you get a chance. It also covers general trends in RIA.

Tools to help in development in Curl.

Kamal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:17:17 GMT

This is my first blog, ever, and I hope that this will just be my first step in the world of blogging with many more to follow.

These are interesting times. The world seems to be moving from the desktop base applications to the Rich Internet Applications by taking the advantage of one of the greatest happenings of our life time, the Internet. A lot of folks are trying to build technologies to make it easier to write applications for the internet. Some of the technologies that immediately come to my mind are Curl, Adobe Flex/Air, Silverlight and REBOL. Each of these technologies are improving by day, and because of the competition they bring in, they are helping each other to be more and more powerful.

Here I am not going to compare these technologies. To be fair, I cannot. I have very superficial knowledge of these except for Curl. I have been associated with Curl since the year 2000 (remember the era of Y2K).

To make a Technology easy to use one must have tools around that technology. If you are developing using Curl then you must know about these tools. I will not go in details as there is already a lot of documentation about these.

1. IDE
- Curl has its own Editor and a powerful Debugger.

Although you can use any text editor to write Curl applications it is not recommended. You miss on syntax highlighting, auto completion, and many, many features that the Curl IDE provides you to write code.

Since you can write your entire client side application using the Curl platform, you can debug each bit of it. That is the best thing I like about using one language to write an entire application. It would be a nightmare to debug it if I had to use other technologies like HTML, JAVA etc. Then the best you could do would be to debug pieces of it only. The same thing is true when doing graphical inspection, profiling, testing, etc.

The IDE also provides you with extensive help. You will find that the Curl help system is very interactive. You can change the code in the example box and hit the "Execute" button and you can immediately see the changes. You do not have to copy these examples to a file and then run it.

In future Curl is going to provide a plugin for Eclipse (it is in Beta stages now) with a lot of features that the current IDE does not have, like error highlighting when writing the code.

2. Graphical Inspector.

If you run a Curl applet, you can do Ctrl+Right click to bring up a context menu. There you can select the "Graphical Hierarchy ..." menu item. This is a very useful tool. Note that this tools lets you inspect the way the graphical objects are arranged. It is a great tool to help you debug and fix a problem and understand how the Applications layout was arranged. Apart from showing the graphical hierarchy, it lets you inspect and change various properties of a Graphic. You can trace the origin of a Graphic and or the height and width preferences and the actual height and width that was give to them by the layout system. It could help you figure out a layout issue.

3. Class Browser.

It lets you browse, navigate, or visualize the class hierarchy.

4. Coverage Viewer.

When ever we write applications, we also write tests against it to make sure that our application works as expected and any future changes to it can help us avoid regression. But how can we be confident about our test suits. Are we testing enough? Coverage tools helps you identify the lines of code that you do not have test cases for.

5. HTTP Monitor.

Helps you investigate the HTTP traffic in your application.

6. Profile Viewer.

Suppose you find that some parts/functionality of your application is taking more time than that you would expect it to take. It will be very difficult if you had to read your code to find that. Curl provides you various ways to profile your application and it also provides you with a UI to analyze the performance data that you collected when doing profiling.

7. VLE (Visual Layout Editor)

It provides you with a visual environment to develop the user interface for your application.

8. Mercury QuickTest professional (QTP) integration.

This facilitates in automated testing.