This note is to announce, belatedly, that Friedger, our first Curl developer community MVP, has joined the Curl Development Utilites (CDU) Open Source project.

Friedger has offered to contribute some of his IDE extensions to open source. The CDU project is the natural place for those to be made available, as its aim is to consolidate useful development techniques.

The CDU originated as internal tools supporting development of external libraries like the WSDK. It provides a test framework, and build drivers. That functionality is now used by both WSDK and CDK open source projects.

Welcome to the project, Friedger!

Hello!

This is my first post as a member of the Curl community. It seems odd to be saying "welcome" to all of you when in fact I'm the newcomer. I hope to earn your respect and make myself useful.

My title at Curl is "VP of Developer Relations" which is a fancy way of saying "ambassador to our developers". Hopefully I can be a lot more than a messenger, however. I actually want to act as your representative so that you have someone in the executive ranks making your case and arguing for the features you want and need on this site and in the product itself. To do that, however, I need your help. Specifically, let me know what you like and don't like about the developer center and the product. We won't be able to change everything we please, but we'll have more influence on our development environment than most communities.

Curl has made some serious strategic moves to create a great community. Curl places so much importance on its development community it created an executive position to address it. That post was previously held by Marc Orchant who died last year. Marc was a great guy and its going to be a challenge trying to fill his shoes. I hope I can live up to his legacy.

Personally, I think its says a lot that Curl chose a non-executive type for an executive position. Although I've been out of the trenches for a couple years, I am, and always will be, more of a developer than a suit. (No offense to those people who do wear suits. You are nice people. Don't change a thing!) I joined Curl because I saw a great technology that needed a grass roots movement. I've been involved in a few grass roots movements in the past (e.g. Java, open source, Java EE) and I can contribute a lot to our community.

One of the first things I want to do is reach out the all you Curlers who have historically been silent and say "Welcome!". I know the developer center doesn't look very different but there is a very different vibe at the home office these days. Curl has always been responsive to its developers - the product engineers frequently answer questions on the forum - but it hasn't been very proactive. I hope to change that. We are going to implement lots of new and helpful features like giving the developer center a face lift, adding better on-line documentation, and much more. In a nutshell you are going to see a lot change and you will hopefully feel a stronger bond to the Curl community.

I'm looking forward to meeting and working with everyone in the Curl community. If you have any questions or just want to chat I'm always available at rmh@curl.com

Again, Welcome!

Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.

Jack Germain, writing at Technology News (part of the ECT Network), provides some excellent coverage of Curl's recent announcement of three open source projects. You can learn more about these projects here in the Developer Community and follow links to the code repositories which are hosted at SourceForge. The three projects that are currently underway are the Web Services Development Kit (WSDK), the Curl Data Kit (CDK), and Curl Development Utilities (CDU).

WSDK, originally released in 2004 and updated in 2006, provides tools to develop Curl applications that make use of Web services such as SOAP/WSDL (Service Oriented Architecture Protocol/Web Services Description Language) and an XML (Extensible Markup Language) document model.

CDK is a library that facilitates data-centric application development in Curl. It features support for client-side SQLite databases, which is the same standard supported by Adobe AIR and Google Gears. The CDK library enables a Curl application to store and retrieve data using SQLite and is an important foundation for Curl applications that support occasionally connected computing (OCC) workflows.

CDU provides functions supporting application development, including unit testing and project development. CDU consolidates techniques used in existing projects, as
these infrastructural components are used by both the WSDK and CDK projects.

Describing Curl, Germain writes:

Curl provides a Rich Internet Application platform for building and deploying Web-based applications. RIA-structured applications require complex, highly interactive interfaces that were previously possible only as client-server applications. Using Curl, developers can implement a new class of complex, business-critical, Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with Ajax or other smart client technologies, said Curl officials. The Curl RIA platform allows corporations with legacy client-server applications to move to Web-based delivery. This can result in increased reach and reduced cost.

David Rubenstein at SD Times also reported on the open source announcement and launch of this Developer Community and nicely captured the essence of the message we've been promoting regarding enterprise adoption of Rich Internet Applications:

Curl, which was acquired in 2000 by the Japanese company Sumisho, has seen a move away from client/server in Asia that is only just getting under way in the United States, according to chief strategy officer Jnan Dash. Business-to-consumer sites that require animation and graphics are driving rich Internet applications, he explained, adding that Adobe's Flash and AJAX are prevalent in those cases. "But nobody's addressing the issue of enterprises that have process-centric apps," he claimed. "The problem is how to take high-cost client/server applications to the Web to take advantage of those benefits."

First a quick introduction as this is my first blogpost here. My name is Jnan Dash and I am the Chief Strategy Officer at Curl since mid-2006. My background is almost 30 years of system software development (16 years at IBM building DB2 product family and 10 years at Oracle as head of strategy and technology for the database server products).

This post will briefly look at 3 hot acronyms making the rounds these days - SOA, Web 2.0, and RIA.

• For last few years, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) has been branded as the big force to cause IT disruption. Someone said, the half-life for hardware is 18 months, whereas the half-life for software is 18 years. So 30 years ago, we had structured programming. Then came Object Oriented programming almost 20 years ago. Now we have "service" as the new abstraction in constructing flexible applications. So business logic (code) encapsulated as "services" can be invoked and assembled as applications to mirror the business process (not the other way around).
• Web 2.0 is the hottest buzzword since end of 2005. When five thousand people are denied access to a Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last year, you know something is happening. Web 2.0 is the new avatar of the Web as a serious platform for building read-write applications. It also emphasizes "harnessing collective intelligence" of the user community. The term Enterprise 2.0 points to the usage of Web 2.0 technologies (mostly deployed in consumer space so far) in enterprises. In other words, Web 2.0 for an enterprise will combine collaborative behavior with transactional behavior.
• RIA (Rich Internet Applications) specifically refers to the development aspects of highly interactive web applications which can range from simple to very complex. Enterprises stuck in old client-server technologies for past 15 years want to embrace the Web as the user interface, instead of the desktop. With RIA, enterprises can combine the best of client-server (rich user interactions) with the ubiquity of the Web. However, many web technologies from the past (DHTML, Javascript, CSS, DOM, Flash/Flex, VB) have serious limitations in terms of high-end scalability, security, reliability, and programmer productivity (read cost and complexity). Martin Heller at InfoWorld does a comprehensive job explaining RIA.

There has to be a merger of these trends and Darryl Taft in an article in eWeek talks about this. Web 2.0 is an umbrella term to describe a set of trends and technologies such as wikis, blogs, mashups, tags, etc. Most of these are used in the consumer websites. As we focus on enterprises endorsing the web for serious business applications to lower cost and enhance user experience, an RIA front-end using Web 2.0 style approach, combined with an SOA-backend becomes the new merged architecture. The Curl product (based on research work at MIT) is an ideal front-end RIA platform for SOA-backend for enterprises. It was designed to address scalability, complex visualization, stateful transactions, reliability, and extreme performance.

First blog posts tend to be a bit awkward - something like a first date I suppose. There are all sorts of decisions to be made like deciding where to begin the conversation and how much information about yourself to share. Never having been much of a bashful person, I'm thinking I'll just jump right in. My name is Marc Orchant. I've been involved with the Curl team for about a month and a half now and, in my role as VP of Developer Relations, it's my happy task to help design and launch a new Developer Center, contribute to this blog, and get a web-wide conversation started with people who build great software solutions about how Curl might fit into their tool kit.

A little background might provide some context for why the folks at Curl thought I'd be a good choice for this job. My biography says that I've been building, testing, and sometimes breaking hardware and software for more than twenty-five years. I've been involved in just about every aspect of the software business from marketing to testing to training to documenting to designing - everything but actually coding.

That's right - I don't write code. I thought it was important to get that out in the open right away. Don't be too concerned about that. There are a number of folks at Curl joining me here on this blog who have helped to build the language, IDE, and RTE (run time engine) who will be keeping you generously supplied with insights into how the Curl language, development tools, and delivery mechanisms can support your application solutions.

My role is that of storyteller. It's been my title on my business card for nearly a decade and it's what I like to do best. Let me explain. I've been blogging professionally since 2002. I helped build the Weblogs, Inc. network and am currently a blogger for ZDNet where I'm the author a blog called Office Evolution. There I discuss the intersection of technology, productivity, mobility, and knowledge work. As part of that work, I have the opportunity to attend many industry events where I have the opportunity to engage with many established and start-up companies developing all manners of great new software and hardware products. I'm also the author of The Unofficial Guide to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 published by Wiley in April 2007. Prior to the advent of blogs, I was a regular contributor to magazines and trade journals and a frequent participant and speaker at technology industry events.

I guess that makes me a "big picture" kind of guy - someone who has the opportunity to look at the macro trends influencing how software is built and distributed, how it's used, and what kinds of challenges and opportunities these trends present for people like you - the developers and designers who are intensely focused on building tools that help organizations and the people who make them run.

OK. So with that out of the way, let me give you some idea of what we will are building to provide you - the developers, designers, and information architects - with tools, resources, and information about developing Richer Internet Applications with Curl. There are three big initiatives underway that I'll be discussing in upcoming posts:

• The Developer Center: a new, highly interactive information site that will be launched this Fall.
• This blog which will act as a platform for us to engage you in conversations about what we're working on and to share information about what's going on in the enterprise rich internet application space.
• Open source initiatives we are undertaking to make critical parts of the Curl development and delivery framework open and accessible to this community to build upon.

I'll be posting on a frequent basis and encourage your feedback in the form of comments, questions, suggestions and... yes, criticisms (of the constructive variety) on how we can make these efforts as useful for you as posible. My e-mail address is mochant at curl dot com if you'd like to contact me directly.