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

Today I would like to announce that Robert Shiplett is second Curler (aka Curlr) to receive the Curl MVP award. Robert is a lead developer at Paisley working full-time as a Curl developer on their Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) product.

Robert is a programming language aficionado who has, in addition to Curl, worked in Smalltalk, Prolog, APL, and C. He is also a fan of other programming languages including Rebol, SNOBOL, UNICON, IO, and Oz. Robert Shiplett, whose first love is Prolog, professes that he is not a Curl zealot, but a Curl fan. That’s high praise coming from a developer who has learned to use so many programming languages.

In his own words Robert told me:

“… as an expression-based language suited to managing content in web applications, it is difficult to rival Curl - especially for Web-based training. And difficult to rival as an IDE (my other favorite languages have no such IDE ).”

Although Robert spends some of his off time scribbling code in SNOBOL 4 on paper at the dinning room table he also interested in the electric guitar (he has 2 of them), telescopes (he has 13 of those), PC flight simulators (he has all of them), R/C planes, languages (French & German), foreign films, poetry, and playing GO, Chess, and Scrabble.

We are excited to add Robert to the small but growing ranks of MVPs, a status which is very well deserved for what has been a great deal of evangelizing on his part. You will see Robert posting often on the developers center - don’t hesitate to congratulation him! You can read more about Robert’s thoughts on Curl and other topics at his blog “eclectic pencil”.

Congratulations Robert!

About the Curl MVP program:

Throughout the year a few exceptional Curl community members will be awarded MVP status. This is in recognition of those individuals who have made substantial contributions to the Curl community and deserve to be recognized for those efforts. 

The first MVP award was given to Friedger Müffke which you can read about here.

The advantages of being an MVP are many-fold including recognition, elevated status in the community, promotion by Curl, instant beta access, and MVP Board membership. The MVP Board will consult with Curl on a semi-annual basis and have influence on Curl's product direction in the future. MVPs represent a critical feedback channel to the community. It’s at the MVP Board meetings that MVPs also will consider nominations for other MVPs and vote to give those awards to deserving community members.



A Curl MVP is someone who has worked hard in the community to help others, spread the word about Curl through speaking, books and articles, and has contributed to the health and vitality of our community. When the award is given it should be of no surprise to the rest of us – MVPs stand out.



The Curl MVP award is recognition of an individual for having furthered Curl as a platform for Rich Internet Applications. In nearly all cases MVPs have given up their free time to help other community members succeed, which is the very foundation on which our community must be built; helping others to succeed with Curl.

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.

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."

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

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.