Curl Blog

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) ..

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CIO Insight's recent survey - RIA is 2nd highest in priority to increase revenue

jnan — Sun, 25 May 2008 00:12:47 GMT

"CIO Insight" magazine did a recent survey of 240 CIO's on which new technologies will boost revenue for their companies.

And guess what? Rich Internet Applications(RIA) ranked as Number 2 (23.6%), right after SOA (23.9%).

Last year, I had mentioned in an interview with Dr. Dobbs about RIA as the low hanging fruit for the enterprises to embrace Web 2.0 for business benefits. Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester Research mentioned in a keynote address at WebBuilder 2.0 last December that for enterprises to endorse Web 2.0, the future is now. He also mentioned that 32% of the enterprises surveyed by Forrester were using or considering RIA. Therefore, the CIO Insight survey showing RIA as second highest in priority to boost revenue does not come as a surprise.

Curl's RIA Platform has been used by over 300 enterprises and many have shown quantitative benefits to their business, over the client-server applications. The requirements to use RIA at the enterprise level is very different and much more stringent. They are looking for industrial-strength attributes such as high performance, extreme reliability, very high security, and big-time scalability. I recently blogged about what questions companies need to ask RIA vendors. Just getting a Flash video stream is not good enough for business-critical applications.

Earlier this year, Curl was awarded the best RIA Platform by InfoWorld. The proof is always with real deployment and benefits by customers.

Mike Vizard of eWeek refers to this survey in his recent blog. He covered the importance of RIA and mentioned Curl as a vendor to watch last December.
When it comes to Enterprise RIA, Curl clearly is the defacto leader.

Ajax Disappoints Power Users

richard — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:45:48 GMT

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