Curl Blog

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

Curl Joins Eclipse Foundation

richard — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:41:04 GMT

Today we announced our membership in the Eclipse foundation. We also detailed our plans to base our developer tools on the Eclipse framework. You can read the details of our approach in a note I posted back in February. Our Eclipse based product will be called the Curl Development Tools for Eclipse or CDE and our exiting IDE will be become the Curl Classic IDE.

Out first CDE release which will be available in the summer will include all the functionality of the Curl Classic IDE, including the Curl language sensitive editor, debugger, search, deployment capabilities, Visual Layout Editor and much more. Future releases of the CDE will integrate the Curl Visual Layout Editor into the Eclipse framework as a Design Perspective, and substantially improve other programming productivity features such as error highlighting in the source-code editor, language sensitive navigation, refactoring and code assistance.

Curl 6.0 Now Available

marc — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 17:30:52 GMT

Today, we announced the availability of of Curl 6.0, the latest release of our development and deployment platform for Richer Internet Applications. Here's the announcement:

Curl Announces Version 6.0 of Rich Internet Application Development Platform

Newest version helps enterprise RIA developers create modern user interfaces and build mashups

Cambridge, MA - November 19, 2007 - Curl, Inc. today announced Version 6.0 of its Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform, which makes it easier for developers to build enterprise-class RIAs. The new release includes significantly expanded user interface styling capabilities, enabling developers to provide a fresh, modernized look and feel, along with an engaging end-user experience for any Curl-based application. Additionally, Version 6.0 enables new kinds of enterprise mashups that integrate JavaScript and Curl APIs.

“Our focus on the enterprise has enabled us to see the specific pain points that organizations face when developing their most mission-critical, sophisticated, Web-based applications,” said Bert Halstead, vice president and chief architect, Curl. “With powerful new look and feel options and the ability to build mashups incorporating JavaScript components, the most powerful platform in the RIA industry continues to bring enterprises the tools they need to address their challenges head-on.”

Key features of Version 6.0 of the Curl platform include:

Skinning Package – This provides new appearance options for controls, including drop shadows, custom images, gradients, and rounded corners. In addition, the new version includes a predefined style sheet and skin that can be used to instantly give Curl applications a modernized look.
Advanced Rendering APIs – Curl 6.0 provides convenient access to advanced features such as antialiasing and alpha blending.
AJAX Interoperability Features – Curl applications can now make calls to JavaScript APIs in the surrounding Web page, and can also be controlled from JavaScript in the surrounding page. Support for parsing and creating data streams in JSON format is included as well. With these features, Curl can be used to build mashups that include data accessed using existing JavaScript APIs.
Server Interoperability Features – With this, Curl provides a server-side Java package that can be used to access data on the server using the Curl serialization format.

“Rich Internet Application technologies have demonstrated their value in the enterprise, and major vendors are now competing for this growing market,” said Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst, Burton Group. “Curl is an excellent option for any enterprise considering RIA technologies. In addition to providing common UI widgets and other controls, Curl surpasses many RIA solutions in terms of richness by providing a solid foundation on which to build extremely sophisticated graphics to visually represent very large sets of data.”

While Curl has brought several new enhancements to its RIA platform, Version 6.0 will continue to provide many of the same attributes that have already made Curl the choice for more than 300 enterprise customers:

Supports a wide range of Windows platforms, as far back as Windows 98, as well as Linux and Mac OS X.
Exhibits the highest run-time performance and the most compact application sizes of any RIA platform.
Enables effective software development by means of the Curl content language that supports text markup, graphics, scripting, and high-performance object-oriented computing, all in one integrated framework.
Supports thousands of APIs such as charts, controls, record sets, animated 2D and 3D graphics, internationalization, and much more.
Provides a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which includes a drag-and-drop visual layout editor, debugger, performance profiler, interactive documentation, deployment tool, and much more.

Curl Version 6.0 is currently available for download at http://www.curl.com/download/index.php.

Curl IDE reviewed in Application Development Times

marc — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:13:49 GMT

Will Kraft at Application Development Times took the Curl IDE for a test drive and is favorably impressed with what he discovered.

After installing, I was greeted with a development environment that reminded me of programming IDEs that I have used in the past, such as Visual Basic and Eclipse. Each Curl project is made of several modules containing code or graphical user interface (GUI) elements, with the entire list of modules conveniently available at all times in the IDE.

The GUI editor in particular is quite nice, with many UI control elements such as buttons, menu boxes, etc. available from a toolbar list, with attributes for each element available on another panel. These tools quickly allow a programmer to make a complicated GUI for a project, although doing it entirely from the source code interface is also an option for more advanced users. A project may be tested by clicking a "run" button on the main toolbar, just like in Visual Basic.

Although my knowledge of the Curl programming language was very limited at the beginning, I was able to make and successfully run a "Hello World" program after consulting an online tutorial. The code syntax is somewhat similar to CSS, with the document structure reminding me of LaTeX, although there are differences. The language gets its name from the use of the "{ }" curly brackets that are used to enclose each command in a Curl application.

Kraft's biggest concerns were the lack of a Linux version suitable for deployment on Ubuntu and other distros that do not use RPM packages and the "cost" of installing the RTE before being able to run Curl applications on the client. As he correctly observes, in an enterprise setting, the decision to deploy Curl is one that would necessarily include rolling out the RTE to users' desktops. The architecture of Curl's approach to application delivery and execution is based on the underlying conviction that small application downloads and native hardware performance trump server-side approaches – especially in enterprise application environments. As to the Ubuntu question, what are your thoughts? Should we undertake an effort to package the Curl IDE for use on this popular distro?