Curl Blog

Web 2.0 Expo - New York

richard — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 23:11:27 GMT

Last week we attended Web2.0 Expo in New York. The show was at the Jacob Javits center and shared the exhibition hall with Interop. The Javits show floor is huge with Web2.0 and Interop each sharing half. The difference between the 2 exhibitions was dramatic. The Web2.0 had the typical start-up small booths whereas the Interop side had sophisticated presentations and lots of consumer style gimmicks like a race car replica / video game and a beautiful custom made motorcycle. See the my pictures here.

It's clear that Web2.0 has gone main stream as large companies like HP and Microsoft had their mega 3 story booths staking a claim to the new wave.

It was busy and I barely had time to see any sessions or walk the floor as I gave more than 25 demos over the 2 days. It was interesting to note that visitors to the Curl booth were much more informed on RIA than our first experience at Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 2007. Many said they had heard of Curl as the new cool RIA. It seems all our efforts to be seen in the RIA landscape are gaining momentum.

Bert Halstead, our chief architect did a great job of positioning Curl in the podcast with David Berlind of Tech Radar. You can hear listen here.
Thanks to Julie, Jnan, Doug, RMH, Norm and Bert for making our show a success. All in all it was a fun show and great to visit NY.

Welcome University of Hawai'i

richard — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 21:00:29 GMT

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.

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.

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

Announcing The WSDK Product

richard — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 00:48:43 GMT

Hello Curlers!

On Tuesday we will announce the release of the Curl Web Services Development Kit - WSDK. Yesterday I briefed Paul Krill of InfoWorld on the announcement and he wrote this article.

This announcement is significant to Curl for a couple of reasons.

This is our first Open Source product. - Back in October of last year we contributed 3 components to Open Source. This was the first step in our open source strategy. We will continue to contribute key components of the product that help support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs to Open Source . Now we have completed the integration and testing of the Curl WSDK and will offer it as a fully supported component of our RIA Platform.

The WSDK links Curl RIA applications directly to SOA - As enterprises continue to execute on their SOA strategy they are increasingly seeing the need to present and visualize large complex data sets on the client. Untill recently complex business processing and data manipulation has been a server side task. Now with RIAs more processing can happen on the client enabling much more responsive and dynamic applications. The WSDK provides the functions to enable direct connection to SOA back-end data.

The WSDK provides a simple way to use web services directly in Curl applications. You are can obtain information resources from a Service Oriented Architecture though SOAP and WSDL, or from a Resource Oriented Architecture though REST and XML.

SOAP Web Services described using WSDL are processed by the WSDK and converted directly into Curl packages and class definitions, which can be used just like any other Curl application component. The service definitions can be processed programmatically, or using a tool in the Curl IDE.

Additionally the WSDK XML Document Model (XDM) provides functionality for processing XML data in Curl: reading, creating, modifying and writing XML documents. XML document contents are represented as a hierarchy of Curl objects. The objects can be accessed using methods and by XPath expressions. They can be displayed, transformed into other Curl representations, and used as a basis for data binding.

In traditional Web environments, Web services and resources are usually consumed by other Web servers. The full potential of web data can be realized using Curl’s rich client environment. Curl clients can directly consume Web services since the Web service technology stack is embedded in the runtime platform. This allows for dynamic presentation and direct interaction with the information resources.

Richard

Thoughts on WEBBuilder2.0

richard — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:57:19 GMT

It's day 2 at the WEBBuilder 2.0 Conference here in Las Vegas. This is our first time at this conference. Compared to the buzz and hype of Web2.0 Summit and Office2.0 this conference is very low key. Attendees are here to learn in detail about how they can improve their on-line properties. Speakers are not the trend setters but the teachers and doers of the web building world. Sitting next to me is Jeanne Morton from Avon who is here to learn how Avon can improve the way they do business with their partners. Much of Avon's systems are old and the company is very conservative and reluctant to open up to Web2.0 technologies and social networking.

Given the audience, Scott Deitzen's first keynote, a sales pitch for Zimbra seemed off the mark. It is interesting that Zimbra struggled to implement their email application in Ajax - some 250,000 lines of code. To handle off-line they wrote a fat client. Isn't this back to a client-server solution.

There must be a lot of companies like Zimbra that think their only option is Ajax and struggle to make that work. We need to be on a mission to explain there are other RIA options like Curl. Hopefully our work with Forrester will help. We'll see today as Jeffrey Hammond is presenting "Technologies of the Future." I sure hope he mentions Curl.

I thought Mark Lucovsky's presentation on "Interactive Search Applications" was on target for the conference audience. Mark's is currently at Google and his background includes more than a decade at Microsoft. Microsoft understands better than any company how to talk to developers and Mark showed that competence in his delivery. Google's view of the lowest level of web developer is "someone that can cut and paste." This is indeed lowering the bar but you can immediately see the power in that paradigm. Mark went through a host of Google Ajax routines that any one can cut and paste into their web page and create sophisticated full function web applications. Google is now creating wizards that prompt you for defining parameters then generates the java code for the function. From there you simply cut and paste and viola - your web mashup! We should look at doing something similar with our Ajax wrapper for Curl functions.

On to Jeffrey's presentation.

Richard

Forrester Releases New RIA Report

marc — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 19:53:40 GMT

Forrester analysts Erica Driver and Ron Rogowski have just published a new report titled "RIAs Bring People-Centered Design To Information Workplaces". It's a comprehensive look at how Ricch Internet Applications have the potential to redefine the work environment in the enterprise. Curl was among the vendors of RIA tools that Forrester interviewed for this report. Other participants included Adobe Systems, Backbase, Cynergy Systems, EffectiveUI, Esria, IBM, Laszlo Systems, Microsoft, Nexaweb Technologies, Oracle, Roundarch, and SAP. Here's the executive summary:

Until recently, the primary options for delivering on the vision of Information Workplaces were enterprise portals or Microsoft Office. While those options remain suitable for many scenarios, rich Internet applications (RIAs) are emerging as vehicles to enable the next generation of Information Workplaces that are best suited for decision-makers and task-oriented workers who engage in complex, multistep processes — people who need seamless, individualized, and highly visual user experiences. Information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals should analyze roles to decide if RIAs are appropriate, integrate data from existing applications into RIA-based Information Workplaces, and test rigorously to make sure that RIA-based Information Workplaces attain optimal results that will improve both employee and end customer experiences.

Update: Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web provides a brief overview of the report and concludes:

...the amount of RIA activity happening on the Web today suggests that the enterprise will indeed be mined. Just as consumer web apps have made their way into the Enterprise over the past few years, so will RIA infiltrate the office.

Curl V6 & Enterprise Mashups

richard — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:01:22 GMT

With the release of V6, Curl applications will be able to interact with Internet based services using Javascript. This opens Curl to the whole world of enterprise mashups. Here are some thoughts on where Curl mashups might provide interesting application in the future.

Andy Dornan defines three types of enterprise mashups in "Mashup Basics: Three for the Money" at Network Computing. They are:

Presentation Mashups - These involve the end user's ability to tailor what they see on the desktop and represent integration at the presentation or visual layer. Examples include sites like my.yahoo and iGoogle. This is the simplest type of mashup as it involves very little real integration allowing the selection and placement of applets into the desktop view.
Data Mashups - These almost always involve programming to integrate different data stores into a new consolidated view. A good example in B2C is Zillow.com that integrates maps, real-estate offerings and local county records to give a consolidated view of local housing markets.
Logic Mashups - These are the most complex type and always involve programming as they combine 2 or more applications and their workflow into a new application. Comparison-shopping sites illustrate this by integrating product and price research with the purchasing process.

This taxonomy provides a good framework to show how Curl might be used in future enterprise mashups. In upcoming posts I'll be considering each in detail but here is my initial thinking.

*Curl Presentation Mashup*- The simplest Curl presentation mashup would involve making Curl applications available as a portlets in the major portal frameworks (Weblogic, Websphere and Sharepoint). Having Curl applications as portlets would let end users select and position them within their portal view.

Curl Data Mashup - Curl is best suited for interactive displays of large complex datasets. This makes Curl an interesting option for data mashups. Paisley, a GRC vendor uses Curl to provide visualization of risk and compliance data integrated from the various departmental and organizational data stores that contain that information. As this type of data visualization becomes more sophisticated Curl users could automatically create new visualizations by gathering different databases on the fly.

Curl Logic Mashup - Curl provides a platform for the implementation of web applications that could only have been implemented as client server applications in the past. Curl's enables the full power of the native desktop hardware similar to a desktop application but delivers the application over the web. In client server applications most of the business logic is on the client but as we moved to the web all this logic moved to the middle application server tier. Over the years the application server tier has become very evolved to the point where application logic is now assembled without programming. A similar evolution has barely begun on the client side for RIA. The opportunity is there to create a much more evolved RIA stack that would enable client-side logic mashups.

Richard

ZDNet coverage of Curl 6.0 beta release

marc — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:15:18 GMT

Ryan Stewart of ZDNet discusses the new Curl 6.0 beta release and likes what he sees. Ryan is a must-follow voice in the Rich Internet Application space. He's been covering RIAs on his personal blog and on The Universal Desktop at ZDnet for quite some time and brings to the discussion his own experience as a Flex developer. Although he's recently joined Adobe as an evangelist for their AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) product, Ryan has maintained a unique and independent voice. If you're tracking this market or are actively involved in developing and deploying RIAs, he's an important resource.

Discussing the new skinnable application controls we've incorporated into version 6.0, Ryan writes:

...the biggest thing for me is the new skinning support. Curl now has a skinning application that lets developers make the interfaces look a lot more polished. The new skinning support uses style-sheets so that most designers will be at home in the environment. Because of the enterprise focus, Curl has always been great performance-wise, but the aesthetics left a lot to be desired. With the new support for skinning, people using Curl will be able to make applications that look good as well as run well. Another piece of this is the new rendering APIs. In addition to skinning, Curl now supports alpha blending and antialiasing. This should really help developers create engaging and interesting interfaces.

Get McAfee's Enterprise article free for a limited time

marc — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:31:51 GMT

Andrew McAfee's article in the MIT Sloan Management Review outlining his thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 (and where the phrase was first coined) has been a subject of great discussion and debate since it's publication. He just announced on the Harvard Business School website that, for a limited time (approximately six weeks), the article can be freely downloaded in PDF format thanks to a sponsorship by IBM. If you're involved in planning an Enterprise 2.0 initiative in your organization, curious about what Enterprise 2.0 is (and isn't), or thinking about RIA develiopment and web-enabling line of business applications in the enterprise, this article should be in your library.

Get it here.

Enterprise RIA Spectrum

richard — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:12:22 GMT

With the release of the RIA Technology Study we commissioned from Sonata it is now clear that there is a spectrum of RIA technologies that serve the diverse needs of Internet applications. These needs define a spectrum from simple B2C interfaces to the more complex highly visual interfaces of real-time enterprise dashboards.

We have created the following graphic to position the RIA technologies along a spectrum from B2C to B2E and B2B.

From the moment I first heard of Curl it was clear to me that it was uniquely suited for demanding enterprise applications. But all our evidence was anecdotal. Now with the release of the Sonata report we have actual numbers to support that positioning.

We have been working with Jeffrey Hammond at Forresterto validate this positioning. It was good to see Jeffrey's comments in the Redmond Developer News article by John Waters.

""Curl has positioned itself exclusively for enterprise organizations, and mainly for business-to-business RIA apps... the Curl RIA platform stacks up well against the competition"

Additionally we have been working with Ryan Stewart, ZDNet bloggerand Abobe RIA Evangelist help educate the market on the Benefits of RIA. We gave Ryan a preview of the Sonata report which he highlighted in this post.

One of the more interesting findings of the report is the trade-off between the size of the run time environment and the size of the application download. The flowing graphs show the RTE and application sizes.

While Ajax has no RTE it takes a heavy penalty with the largest application size. At the other end of the spectrum Curl's runtime is the largest at almost 8MB but using pCurl compression it has the smallest application size by a wide margin. This design trade-off further validates Ajax as the choice for simple B2C applications that can't tolerate a commitment to downloading a large RTE. While Curl is most appropriate for larger more complex B2E and B2B applications where downloading an RTE once is well worth the benefit in application performance and scale.

Richard

Introducing The RIA Knowledge Center

richard — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 22:06:09 GMT

Over the last 6 months we have been educating the US market on the benefits of RIAs. In talking to IT organizations, ISVs, VARs and SIs it has become apparent that there is very little information about the benefits of RIAs to the enterprise.

In order to help the RIA cause we have created the RIA Knowledge Center. The RIA Knowledge Center is a place for information about RIA technologies and the business benefits they drive. In the spirit of "a rising tide helps all boats" it is our intent that the Knowledge center be as vendor neutral as possible. The repository will feature information about the deployment of RIA solutions and include podcasts, whitepapers, analyst reports and articles.

Additionally over the last 9 months we have been tagging the Internet and blogosphere for all things RIA. Some far we have created over 280 relevant RIA tags. You can see the complete set of tags here.

The Knowledge Center information is organized into 4 categories.

The Business Case for RIA - These articles and reports focus on how the enterprises are measuring the benefits of RIA. Over the next several months we will be working with Forrester to provide more detailed studies on the ROI for enterprise RIA. Today you will find Ron Rogowski's report on \\"The Business Case for Rich Internet Applications.\\" (Note that the Forrester Reports that we are paying to distribute and valued at $379 do require registration)
RIA User Interfaces - Much of the benefit of RIA is derived from improved user interfaces and is critical in measuring the RIA benefit. Reports in here focus on how improved user experience can have a direct impact on both top and bottom line of the your business.
Technology Comparisons - There are a lot of RIA technologies and platforms available today. How to make sense of it all? In this section we will explore the benefits and challenges of each of the major alternatives. Today we announced the release of a detailed study performed by Sonata that compares Ajax, Flex and Curl.
Use Case Scenarios - To date there have been very few documented enterprise RIA use cases. Curl has over 300 enterprise customers in Japan including Sony, Panasonic and NTT Communications. Over the next serveral months we will be providing the details of these deployments and how the benefits have been measured.

We hope the Knowledge Center will be of use to all those researching RIA technologies and contemplating projects.

Your comments are welcome.

Richard

RIA Technology Panel at Office 2.0

richard — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 22:02:42 GMT

It has been a busy first day at Office 2.0. Marc, Jnan and I are here to represent Curl's Platform as an alternative to other more well know RIA alternatives such as Adobe's Flex.

Marc moderated a panel that explored the state of RIA adoption by enterprises in the
market.

Representing the different RIA technologies were Peter Armstrong for Ruby, Kevin Hakman for Tibco, Ryan Stewart for Abobe, David Tempkin for Laszlo and of course our own Jnan Dash representing Curl.

Marc did a great job moderating and got a lively discussion going.

Marc started the discussion by putting out a definition of RIA from Martin Heller at InfoWorld.

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically launches from the remote server.

The first question was when will the fortune 1000 jump onto the RIA bandwagon?
Ryan made the point that it will be end users that will drive adoption, but many on the panel including Kevin and Jnan see that adoption is already underway and it is driven by real business needs.

Jnan pointed as we know that in Japan Curl is deployed in business critical applications at companies like Panasonic, Sony and Toyota. That matched Kevin's experience at Tibco were their fortune 1000 companies are seeing the benefit of RIA in particular at HR block.

All agreed with the point that it's hard to get enterprises to talk about applications behind the firewall. No one wants to give away their competitive differentiation.

Jnan pointed out an insight we got from our recent meeting with Accenture. As I have notedthe adoption of RIA in Japan seems to be a couple of years ahead of the US. What the folks at Accenture pointed out is that Japan is much more prone to do in house IT development. This has lead them to implement solutions using RIA directly to satisfy business imperatives. In the US market IT is much more likely to choose packaged software over in house IT development. This means that RIA adoption will be driven by ISVs and to this point ISVs have not felt the competitive pressure to cause them to create better products through the deployment of RIA.

See also the post on the panel at Blognation by Tris Hussey

Richard

A perfect definition of RIA

marc — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:22:26 GMT

Martin Heller, who profiled Curl 5.0 in a very favorable review I wrote about last week, has just posted a brief but excellent explanation of just what Rich Internet Applications are, where they fit in the overall development continuum, and where application development is headed. Here is the essence of how he describes what an RIA is and the challenges the technology, in a generic sense, is ideally suited to address:

RIAs attempt to combine the strengths of desktop and Web applications without falling prey to their weaknesses. RIAs try to present most of their user interfaces at the client so that they can be responsive and the interface can be as complex as it needs to be. RIAs often do need an installation, but usually only for the runtime engine, which tends to be small and most often updates itself automatically. The RIA application itself typically executes on the remote server.

RIAs try to allocate resources to the most appropriate place. If the gating issue is the overall scalability of the application, then the designer of the RIA will run most of the CPU-intensive computations on the client. On the other hand, if the application uses a database intensively, then many actions will run on the server.

Many RIAs are written to accommodate intermittent connectivity. If such an app needs a database resource, a local database kicks in when the local computer disconnects from the Internet. When an Internet connection is reestablished, the application synchronizes the local database with the central database.

Perfect. As I've begun to help evangelize Curl in the blogging community and have been constructing my thoughts on how to best articulate why I think this approach represents an important hybridization of the polar extremes of fat client and web-based applications, I've touched on most of these points but nowhere near as eloquently or concisely. I encourage you to read the entire article and bookmark it for future reference and sharing with colleagues. I certainly have.

The Gnomedex Charleston

richard — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 22:56:18 GMT

It was fun attending Gnomedex last week. I was there with Marc Orchantrepresenting Curl and reaching out to the blogger community to raise the awareness of Rich Internet Application technologies. This was Marc's first Gnomedexbut as a professional blogger it seemed he knew everyone there. Gnomedex was planned as the event we would out the news that Marc joined Curl to help build the Curl developer community and raise awareness of RIA technologies in the enterprise.

The last time I attended Gnomedex in 2004 the feature was the announcement of Microsoft getting on the RSS band wagon. Blogging was taking off big time. With Rubel and Siffry featured prominently in the BusinessWeek cover article, \\\"Blogs Will Change Your Business.\\\" There were 9 million blogs. This was "the wild frontier." Technorati and PubSub were the leading contenders for blog search.

Just 2 years later Gnomedex 7 had a decidedly different tone. Today PubSub imploded in a melt down that I witnessed first hand and Technorati is tracking over 70 million blogs.Now that you can make a living as a professional blogger, the conversation is turned from the "wild frontier" to "getting down to business." Marc's kids friends are always surprised to hear what he does for a living " you mean they pay you to blog." Now we have public voices we also have public exposure like never before with all the good and bad that comes with that. What happened to Kathy Sierra (one of my favorite bloggers) has become a real worry. Vanessa Fox's session generated a good discussion about privacy and safety on-line.

I also especially enjoyed Gregg Spiridellis talk about the history of JibJab and how their business model has been changing on a regular basis. Now they're into the personal cards market making entertaining user generated content. We got a great laugh as he featured Scoble and Pirillo in a Hawaiian number. Good fun. Here's my version.

As always Gnomedex-networking is the highlight. You can find new interesting ideas and get a pulse on the state of the blogosphere from those that shape it on the front lines. I had a great conversation with Ryan Stewartwho has been blogging on RIA for almost 2 years know. He recently joined Abobe and it was fun hearing of his adventures on the Adobe onAIR bus tour. He has seen a real increase in the RIA interest level over the last 4-6 months. We also talked about how the event driven publish-subscribe technologies like KnowNow have seen slow adoption. RIA's should be the interface of choice for real-time data driven applications. This is something Adobe is working to evangelize with their Flex Data Services.

Ryan thinks that bloggers are 6-9 months away from really understanding RIA. I think it may even be longer. What we notice with Curl's experience is that the US is at least 2 years behind Japan in the adoption of RIA. In fact in Japan they don't even think of it as RIA but rather as a means to end. The question is not "How can I use RIA to reduce TCO and get to new markets", but "How can I reduce my procurement time" or "How can I get my product to more distributors." Use of RIA technologies are only a means to reach their business goals. Hopefully the US enterprise RIA market will start to see growth in the next 6 months.

Richard