Curl Blog

From the horse's mouth

jnan — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 05:24:20 GMT

I just read an interview by Michael Desmond of The Redmond Developer with Brad Becker, Microsoft's director of Rich Client Paltforms (Silverlight team). Interestingly, Brad came to Microsoft from Adobe (Macromedia Flex team actually).

Brad spent many years building client solutions with Flex and he says this - "But what I was running into was Flex was really good for starting a project, but it was really hard to finish anything with it. You'd start running into issues with performance and with scalability and things like that. So we'd end up having to go back to the metal. You'd have to dig into Flash itself and hand-tweak things iFlash, and then you'd be back into the morass of movie clips and timelines and cell-based animation."

So was there frustration using Flex? Brad said, "Flash was designed for doing cartoons on the Web; It's actually really good at that. But at the end of the day, anytime you use a high-level framework, there's always times when you have to go below the framework back to whatever is underneath. So it was still a pain."

When it comes to enterprise-grade RIA for business critical functions, Flex and AIR have ways to go. Even Silverlight, whose first target has been video rendering (e.g. Beijing Olympics), is yet to prove as a industrial-strength platform for mission-critical RIA for large enterprises.

Curl, on the other hand, has been deployed successfully at over 400 large global customers for such high-performing, secure, and scalable applications.

AjaxWorld 2008, San Jose, CA

jnan — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:41:42 GMT

I just attended AjaxWorld 2008 in San Jose, California. The theme of this conference was "2008: Decision Year for RIAs". Here is a quick summary.

The first day keynote was by Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. Scott manages the development platforms including Silverlight. He gave several demos. The first one showed ASP .Net MVC (Model View Controller), JQuery, and Visual Studio 2008. The second demo was Silverlight and RIA-based development. Silverlight claims cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in. The Linux version is done with Novell. Most of the examples were on video streaming at sites such as NBC Olympics, the DNC (Democratic National Convention). He claimed the NBC Olympics had 70 million streams in 14 day period. AOL mail was another example using Silverlight. Some SAP front-ends are now using Silverlight. He claimed one of every four PC's now run Silverlight, kind of hard to believe, specially when Silverlight Release 2 was launched lat week. I wrote a response to a blog post on this. Microsoft deserves credit for "adaptive streaming" on varieties of line speeds ranging from 250 kbps to 2 Mbps. They clearly focus on beating Adobe's Flash player in video streaming. The business application part of Silverlight is weak on examples and functions, but high on claims. Silverlight claims multi-language support like C#, VB, Python. They claim rich query of data and local caching. The download is 4.6 MB and everything fits in that (includes 100s of built-in controls). For example, they have HTML API for programming pure HTML apps. All functions like calendaring have skinnable controls. Visual Studio is their IDE. The combination of VS 2008 and Microsoft Expression addresses the designer+developer community.

Matt Quinlan from Appcelerator stared by saying "users may times don't now what they want. If Ford would have asked users what they wanted, they would have a said 'a faster horse'". Appcelerator provides a framework to speed up Ajax development. It provides a higher order expression language that generates Javascript. He said Javascript is "mountains of code" and pointed out that Google Map has 6535 lines of Javascript code. He derided Javascript as tedious, error-prone, boiler-plate stuff. It was interesting that many presenters showed Ajax frameworks to speed of development.

Oracle made a presence this time. They showed their existing tools such as JDeveloepr and ADF (Application Development Framework) all using some new technology. It's "old wine in a new bottle". There is no front-end client-centric RIA story. They are from a Java server-centric culture and are sticking to that.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch presented on day 3 early (poor audience) and I missed that, but supect he glorified Adobe Flex and AIR.

Curl got good visibility. I presented on first day a session titled "RIA - Real Examples and Lessons Learnt", where four concrete customer examples were described, showing benefits of using Curl. Then Richard and I gave an interview to Sys-Con TV (not published yet). I also participated at a power panel yesterday on the subject "How are RIAs benefiting the bottom line?" You can see the other participants including last minute addition of Adobe (James Ward). Our simple booth was busy with many visitors getting a demo of Curl from the expert hands of Richard.

This AjaxWorld had several hundred people (my guess - 400), many did
not show up due to the harsh economic condition prevailing now.

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.

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.

Questions to ask your RIA Vendor

jnan — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:03:23 GMT

Enterprises are looking to exploit the web as a platform for their business applications. This will be a natural progression from the client-server model, the dominant architecture for last 15 years or so. There are two reasons behind this trend.

- First, the web as an ubiquitous platform has seen a lot of activity in the consumer space, with the success of Google applications, Google Maps, Flickr, Youtube, etc. Industry experts call this Web 2.0. It's natural for enterprises to explore how such technologies can be adopted for the enterprise.

- Second, use of the web platform over client-server has great economic advantages. It lowers the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership). It seems clear that one immediate area to bring Web 2.0 to the enterprise is the RIA - improve the user experience and lower the cost. This is proven by numerous examples of Curl's wide use in Japan.

So, in order to evaluate RIA technology, what questions should companies ask the RIA vendor? Here are just ten such sample questions. There are more.

1. Do you have enough functionality for creating dashboards for BI applications?

2. Can you construct transactional stateful applications, much like what we have in client-server today?

3. Do you provide functions such as drill-down, mouse-over pop-ups, and rich library of charts and graphs?

4. Do you have just-in-time compilation at the client for super-fast performance? Otherwise, how do you minimize latency from the roundtrip's?

5. Can you run these applications offline, for subsequent sync. when connected? What's your data-persistence approach at the client?

6. Do you have high-class IDE support for fast programmer productivity?

7. Do you provide scalability (no performance degradation with growth in users and workload)?

8. Do you provide enterprise-class security (sandbox, secure access to resources,...)?

9. Can you handle large volume of data with good performance (100K records processed at the client-side)?

10. Can you fit into the back-end ecosystem such as J2EE, Oracle, DB2, Weblogic, Websphere, etc.?

Answers to such questions will be critical for enterprises to pick the right vendor.

Web 2.0 Expo - April 22-25, 2008

jnan — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:31:21 GMT

I had briefly reported from the Web 2.0 Expo last week. Here is an overall summary of the event.

I have been going to all the Web 2.0 events since they started back in 2005. It's quite remarkable how fast the attendance has grown. There used be just one conference in November. Due to its popularity they made it into two events - We 2.0 Expo in April and Web 2.0 Summit in October. The one in the fall tends to be much more technical. The expo is broader and the attendance is much larger. The success of this event has prompted the organizers (O'Reilly & company) to have similar events in New York, Tokyo, and Europe since 2007.

For those who are confused by the term Web 2.0, you are in good company of many. Ambiguity is the name of the game here. The phrase Web 2.0 was coined to explain the evolution of the Web to being a serious platform for the future applications, as opposed to the first phase (Web 1.0) where static pages were delivered and user-interactivity was quite limited. Also it was architecturally poor and slow to perform with all the page refreshes. Web 2.0 deals with asynchronous access to servers, polling data to the client cache for continuous feeding (e.g. Google Maps), hence it feels like a local desktop application. The phrase Ajax was coined 2 years ago to highlight the asynchronous aspects, even though the underlying technology remains the same - HTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM, XML,..

During 2005 and 2006, almost all the attendees at the Web 2.0 events were young kids working on start-ups like Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, etc. During last year's Web 2.0 Summit, the first session was with Marc Zuckerberg, the 23 year old who founded Facebook. The same night, the dinner guest was the 73-year old Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation and owner of MySpace. During my first attendance back in 2005 Fall, I felt like a fish out of water. There were no large enterprises including my former employers like IBM or Oracle. I could not recognize anyone from my generation. No gray hair from the client-server era. But it was lots of fun watching the kids re-invent the same issues some of us had worked on years back. Topics like stateful applications, transactional integrity, secure commits to the database, good scalability when numbers rise fast, were all being revisited. I call this "Back to the Future". So all the discussions centered around the "consumer space". It's like the boom-years of 1997-2000 when Jeff Bozos of Amazon said, "profit,? I spell that as Prophet." People started talking about another "bubble" around Web 2.0. No one seemed to care about "monetization" or "business value".

Zimbra got a standing ovation in the fall of 2005 when it displayed its email with pop-ups as you mouse thru the content. Yahoo bought Zimbra for $300m, but its future inside Yahoo is clouded as much as Yahoo's own future. This year, I noticed a remarkable shift. Suddenly large enterprises are everywhere. IBM had a big booth. So did Oracle. Juniper networks, HCL, Nokia, all had large booths. Even the sessions were full of speakers from large corporations. The classic "social-networking-is-the-future" crowd was also there, but they seemed less in number.

This is good for us at Curl, as we position our solution for the enterprise, serious to deploy the business-critical applications on the new web platform. We gave over 120 demos to visitors in our booth. Many of the visitors asked serious questions this time. Some have tried to implement complex visualization apps. via Adobe Flash, or via one of many Ajax frameworks, but were highly disappointed with scalability and functions. Programmer productivity is a key factor. Rapid prototyping is also crucial for creating proof points. Gone are the days of long development cycle. Getting users involved during the design process is key to success. Cul renders itself well to these approaches. We need to continue aggressively with our "awareness campaign" for the enterprise crowd.

In summary, I was not that surprised with the evolution of Web 2.0 towards more "enterprise focus". The same phenomenon was also visible at the AjaxWorld in New York during March. There were more discussions on "building RIA outside Ajax", as people realize the deficiencies of Ajax frameworks.

Why Criminal Hackers Will Love Adobe AIR

rhh — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:39:15 GMT

Adobe has released their new AIR product with much fanfare about letting developers "use proven Web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems." The grand vision that's being promoted is that AIR is pioneering the application development model of the future, where cross-platform applications will be developed using a platform-independent tool such as AIR, and then deployed across the Web as downloadable gadgets that can be installed on any computer.

The concept is attractive, but there are several weaknesses in the way AIR implements it. One of these weaknesses is performance: while the speed of AIR's execution engine may be fine for gadgets, will performance that is still an order of magnitude slower than native code be acceptable for serious applications like Adobe's own Photoshop? (Note that the recently released Photoshop Express service is not an AIR application; it's a server-side application with a Flex front end.) A second weakness is the complexity of the AIR execution architecture: will future application developers really find AIR's conglomeration of JavaScript and ActionScript execution engines to be a more tractable development platform than a single, coherent, object-oriented execution environment? But the weakness I want to address today is AIR's security architecture.

Security is a central issue for any mobile code execution platform. When a user loads an application from a server, unless the user is able to verify the authenticity of the application and the trustworthiness of the application's provider, it is only prudent to assume that the application could be malicious. This is why Web browsers execute the JavaScript on a Web page inside a security sandbox that prevents the script from stealing information or damaging files even if it is malicious.

Some advanced mobile code platforms, such as Java and Curl, provide a sandbox for garden-variety untrusted applications, as well as a means for eliminating the sandbox restrictions for applications that a user determines can be trusted. Since trusted applications will have full access to the user's machine and network, it is very important that their origin can be authenticated. This is typically done by requiring that a trusted application be digitally signed by its provider, using a certificate issued by a recognized certification authority such as Verisign. This architecture extends the range of a platform, in a safe way, so it can handle a spectrum of application requirements that includes the features of typical desktop applications, many of which require fuller access than can be granted to an untrusted application running in a sandbox.

The designers of AIR obviously wanted to play in the desktop application space, so AIR applications have full access to the machine they are running on. But it seems that the AIR designers were unwilling to give up on also being a platform for casually loaded Internet gadgets, even though they did not see fit to give AIR a sandbox for running untrusted applications. The result is a mongrel security architecture that may impose costs on a lot of innocent people over time.

In a nod to the authentication requirements for trusted applications, Adobe says that all AIR applications must be signed. But the nod is an empty gesture, because AIR does not require signatures to be based on a certificate from a recognized certification authority! If you want, you can create your own certificate out of whole cloth and sign your AIR application with that! I have to guess that Adobe did this because they didn't want to cut themselves off from the casually loaded Internet gadget domain, and they weren't willing to require that the creators of such gadgets go through the process of obtaining a legitimate certificate.

Yes, if an AIR application's certificate is self-signed, AIR displays the publisher as "UNKNOWN", "giving the user pause as to whether they should continue." But what detective work is the user expected to do? How many users will actually be able to do it? It seems more likely that if Adobe's dreams for AIR are realized, a generation of users will be trained in the habit of clicking "Install" for fully privileged AIR applets of unauthenticated provenance. Adobe has already begun this training program by posting a large number of self-signed AIR applications on the Adobe AIR Marketplace, including the DiggTop feed reader, twhirl Twitter client, and Google Analytics Reporting Suite, just to name a few.

The resulting situation will be a bonanza for criminal hackers. AIR will become the first truly cross-platform tool for distributing malicious applications. Macintosh and Windows, home and business computers will all be equal-opportunity targets for Trojan horse attacks, keystroke loggers, etc., truly realizing the dream of "write once, hack everywhere!"

Adobe can't have it both ways. Casually loaded Internet gadgets need to run in a security sandbox. Trusted applications need to be rigorously authenticated. Adobe needs to stop pretending that their self-signed application model provides a secure basis for running casually loaded applications with full privileges.

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.

Brief Observations from AjaxWorld this week in New York

jnan — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:44:46 GMT

This was my first time at AjaxWorld, which celebrated its fifth year as a conference. It was well-attended with more than 300 people from many parts of the world. Big players like Sun, IBM, Microsoft, and Yahoo were there. I did not see anyone from Adobe. There were many new players, mostly offering tools and framework for rapid Ajax development. Unlike Web 2.0 Expo or Web 2.0 Summit, there were no consumer-oriented Web 2.0 companies. Here everyone focused on enterprise-class application development. The crowd was a serious programming crowd well versed in object oriented programming and UI design. The first keynote from a developer at Yahoo warned everyone of the security exposures of scripting languages like Javascript. for enterprise-class applications. There were many sessions on architecture, and standards such as Comet. A whole track focused on iPhone as a platform for new mobile applications.

What was interesting to observe was the shift from "pure Ajax" to much wider coverage of RIA. Of course Microsoft was there extolling the virtue of Sileverlight 2.0, which was just announced for beta, one week ago. They claimed that Silverlight 1.0 was very weak in many respects but the 2.0 will be far better. One speaker even said if 1.0 was like a Black and White TV, then 2.0 is the equivalent of a 1080P HDTV quality. There were enough mention of Adobe Flex and AIR by various speakers.

Curl was presented by Bert Halstead in a topic titled "RIA beyond Ajax" and it was well attended. I also happened to be on a power panel on day 1 with 3 others like Coach Wei of Nexaweb and Jeff Haynes of Appcelerator. We got good visibility through that forum. IBM presented their Info 2.0 architecture which focuses vary much on Mashups as a way to bring rich user experience to the enterprise. Sun presented JMaki, a set of configuration and customization tools for JavaFx. Someone mentioned that 2008 is Adobe's year, whereas 2009 will see Silverlight into prominence. By 2010, Sun's JavaFx will become a key player. This is the opinion of a respected technologist, an Adobe Flex consultant and educator. We believe the emerging desktop delivery of web applications (minus the browser) may add velocity to RIA adoption in the enterprise, as they start migrating legacy client-server to the web.

I was convinced that the enterprises are open to explore new technologies beyond Ajax to address their critical needs. And this is good for Curl.

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

Why Is an Enterprise RIA Platform Different?

richard — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 00:50:07 GMT

Why is an Enterprise RIA Platform different? Simple - It must handle the demands of enterprise class applications.
Based on Curl's experience with large enterprise deployments at companies such as Panasonic, Toyota
and Sony we find enterprise demands are focused in the following areas:

Large datasets that demand high client-side performance;
Complicated operations that require superior user interface design;
Data visualization that requires high performance client-side graphics;
Large scale deployments with thousands of users worldwide that require performance that scales;
Complex applications that demand a development environment that scales to hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Large Datasets

Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that web application must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records. In an independent study Curl has proven to be 70% faster that Adobe Flex when loading large data sets.

Nippon Sheet Glass Co. is an example of the need for high performance. Nippon Sheet Glass is a leading provider of industrial glass products. The pricing and configuration of these glass products is highly complex. The
application handles as many as 99 different pricing scenarios with various sizes and patterns and large data sets with up to 5000 transactions with up to 10,000 items per transaction.

Superior User Interface Design

The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the iPhone experience have shown that great user interface design makes a big difference. Now more than ever enterprises are realizing that user interface design can reap great returns though process improvement and employee productivity.

Using Curl a large electronics manufacturer was able reduce procurement times for their video cameras by 5 days which
amounted to a huge savings. This was possible by making previously serial processes asynchronous demanding superior
user interfaces to handle that complexity intuitively.

DataVisualization

Many enterprise applications drive timely decisions through the use of effective data visualization of complex
data. This often requires high performance rendering of complex objects.
Curl uses the native graphics capability of the client hardware for maximum performance. You can see first
hand by trying one of our demo applications that does real-time ray-tracing.

Paisley has become a recognized market leader in the fast-growing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) sector by offering
clearly superior solutions. Quality, analytics and reporting are most important in choosing a governance, risk and compliance solution. Using Curl, Paisley’s solution offers a high-performance, sophisticated reporting capability that clearly differentiates their offering. You can read the complete case study here.

Large Scale Deployments

Enterprise RIA deployments must scale to service thousands of users. With Curl much of the application processing occurs on the client which means that the server loads are much lower as the number of users increases. In many Curl enterprise deployments only a single server is required even as the application is delivered to thousands of users.

This is the case with Panasonic’s Voice of the Engineer (VOE) application. The VOE application provides comprehensive support data on Panasonic’s products for their support engineers as they help customers with product problems. The application is used by all Panasonic engineers in Japan and will soon expand to worldwide use.

Complex Applications

Many enterprise applications must deal with complex business logic, many functional elements and large numbers of screens. These complex applications often require hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The complexity of such applications can easily overwhelm development efforts using simple AJAX tools.

The Curl language combines the descriptive and active elements found in traditional web-development tools with the strength of a full-featured object-oriented programming language. The language spans the full range of requirements, from simple text markup and GUI layout to heavy-duty object-oriented computing. This means more capability is provided with fewer lines of code lowering development and maintenance costs.

Richard

My interview with Dr. Dobb's editor Jonathan Erickson

jnan — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 00:53:48 GMT

Dr. Dobb's magazine, primarily targeted for software development community published an interview with me today. These few questions and answers pretty well capture Curl's strength and positioning in the market place. Let me thank Bert for his help.

We expect this year 2008 to see a rapid rise in RIA adoption by the US enterprises and that will be good for the Curl RIA platform.

Jnan

Reflections - 2007

jnan — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:26:09 GMT

As we get closer to the end of 2007, it's important to reflect on the progress we have made at Curl in the US market. We launched Curl formally at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last April. We should count that as the start of our US launch. We have done numerous analysts briefings to explain the positioning of Curl, in the enterprise RIA space. The result of all that effort , for example, is the latest post from Ryan Stewart's about us. This is what he said: "Flex had a great year but is it the primary technology for building RIAs? I think at this stage of the game it’s the most mature but primary is a strong word. One thing that’s happened over this year is that the field of RIAs has really blown up. We’ve got Curl, Ajax getting more advanced and Silverlight/WPF applications in the wild. It’s too tough to call Flex the primary technology."

We also saw yesterday's post by Mike Vizard of eWeek. This is what he said: "RIA is expected to be one of the hottest categories inapplication development circles this coming year thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and Adobe, but if you want to create a rich Web interface for an existing client/server application you might want to take a look at what companies such as Curl, Asperon and Nexaweb are up to these days."

During August 2007, we published a study comparing Ajax, Flex, and Curl. This study was widely discussed and I presented it at WebBuilder 2.0 two weeks ago at Las Vegas. Curl's strength as the high-end RIA platform came out loud and clear. Take a look at our new website. We introduced the RIA Knowledge center. We had our first developer day at Paisley 's (a key customer) office in Minneapolis last May. We also launched a brand new developer site.

So all in all, we have raised the awareness of Curl and as we step into 2008, the mantra is execution and customer adoption.
Happy holidays to all of you.

Technologies Of The Future

richard — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 07:20:37 GMT

That last keynote at WEBBuilder 2.0 featured Jeffrey Hammond speaking about key trends in Web2.0 adoption in the enterprise. There was lots of really interesting data that makes the compelling case that 2008 will be THE infection point in the adoption of Web2.0 in the enterprise. Regarding Web2.0 adoption Jeffrey's message was clear:

"The Future is NOW"

Through his research and discussion with clients and vendors he predicts a "perfect storm" as changes in workforce, software, business process and design collide.

One of the key drivers is 70-80% of GenYers create content and use Internet and mobile apps in all their interactions - virtual and real. As they enter the work force their expectations of a productive environment will drive change faster then ever before. Some other interesting points.

47% of surveyed CIOs see Web2.0 as more than a passing fad
70-80% GenXers and GenYers are creators of content as compared to only 12% for Boomers
1 out of 12 employees is blogging
The Web has brought people closer - In his research Jeffrey uses Linkedin and he has never looked up a person that was less than 3 degrees away. Remember the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon...
Web2.0 is is creating the 4th major programming model - Dynamic applications - these are assembled "just in time" Mashups from parts that are ready to use. This is the process savvy mashup.
32% of enterprises are using or considering RIA

All in all there is a lot of positive trends that say it will be a good year for RIA adoption and Curl.

I asked Jeffery to send me the slides and will follow-up with a more thoughtful post after the conference.

Richard

Microsoft bumps Silverlight to 2.0

marc — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 13:00:14 GMT

There's been quite a bit of buzz in the RIA world following Microsoft's announcement that Silverlight 1.1 has been supplanted by version 2.0. The biggest change, based on early reports, is a clearer articulation of the company's positioning strategy for Silverlight. Based on a post by Tim Sneath, it appears clear that Silverlight is now the RIA/web app component for Windows Presenttation Foundation (WPF) and has been reworked to align better with that framework.

So what's coming in Silverlight 2.0? I think the thing that excites me the most about this release is the scale and breadth of UI innovation going into Silverlight. In WPF, we have a really powerful platform for building Windows desktop applications, and it will remain the "Ferrari" that contains the highest level of graphical functionality. Silverlight takes that same UI framework and transports it to the web, enabling RIA developers to create web-based applications using all the same skills as they need to build sophisticated Windows client applications. This unification of the framework across web and desktop is not easy to accomplish; many of the breaking changes that you'll see between Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and the Silverlight 2.0 Beta have been introduced to bring about far greater consistency between Silverlight and WPF. The goal is to make it really easy to take a Silverlight application and bring it to the desktop: you shouldn't have to completely rewrite the code to reach across the barrier to an offline solution.

Ryan Stewart has some interesting thoughts about this announcment and sits in an unusual spot as one of the most vocal and active analysts covering RIA technologies and also an Adobe AIR evangelists. SOme of the Microsoft faithful are issuing pronouncements like, "Watch out Adobe". I'm sure Ryan would agree that this announcement and the ongoing maturation of Silverlight has caught no one at Adobe (or anyone else working in this space) by surprise. He discusses how the more evolved UI and architecture makes Silverlight more directly comparable to Flash:

"...they’ve overhauled some of the technical aspects in Silverlight 2.0. The rich control set is aimed at giving you the ability to create actual applications and they are going to have a high level of networking support. Scott’s blog says you’ll be able to expect REST, POX, RSS and Web Services from Silverlight. This brings it up to par in a lot of ways with Flash on the networking side"

Silverlight 2.0 is slated for public release at MIX08 in Las Vegas this March. Expect a continual stream of information "leaks" between now and then as the strategy, positioning, and technical details become more defined.