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

Recently we wrote about some performance measurements showing Curl to be an order of magnitude faster than ActionScript 3 when executing a JPEG encoding algorithm. Our report hit a nerve with Ted Patrick at Adobe, causing him to question

1. Who cares about JPEG encoding performance in an RIA anyhow? Is there a single mainstream RIA that uses it?
2. Are the results of any performance benchmark really meaningful? and
3. Which is more important anyway, performance or wide deployment?

I'd like to address these points. First, JPEG encoding is important in some of Adobe's own applications. The Adobe AIR Salesbuilder application has a feature that can save a snapshot of your dashboard as a JPEG file on your desktop. The Salesbuilder demo script warns that this operation "can take a few seconds." This usability glitch is directly a function of the JPEG encoding speed that we studied. For a more compelling example, consider the recently launched Adobe Photoshop Express service. It can only run in on-line mode, and processing-intensive operations such as JPEG encoding are handled on the server, but if you ever wanted to create an offline, Adobe AIR style of application like this, JPEG encoding speed would absolutely matter. Given the importance of photo sharing and processing in the Web economy, can we really say that this task is not significant?

But for us, JPEG encoding is just a representative of a much larger set of tasks that a truly powerful RIA will have to do, which require application-specific coding in the inner loops. These tasks cannot be structured as just a series of calls from a scripting language to a set of predefined, pre-optimized modules that are bundled into the RIA plugin. For example, a typical requirement for enterprise dashboard applications is to handle a "data cube" model with thousands of data points in it. (See the Curl Business Intelligence Demonstration on our enterprise demos page for one example.) No RIA platform includes data cubes as a primitive data type, so even the inner loops of the code that distills information from the data cube to the presentation have to be written as part of the RIA application, where they are subject to the same performance laws as our JPEG encoding case study.

Regarding question (2), we think our benchmark test was pretty fair because we just used the same coding structure that is used in Adobe's own code. However, we would welcome any interest from Adobe in improving their ActionScript for JPEG encoding and reporting on the results!

Finally, the value of wide deployment over performance varies a lot depending on your situation. In many scenarios, wide deployment is very important. Heck, we use Flash ourselves to add some visual punch to our corporate home page that all comers can enjoy! For this kind of application, wide deployment often trumps performance and you adjust your ambitions, if necessary, to fit the constraints of the platform.

But Curl has excelled for enterprise applications and is already in use by more than 300 companies, many of them household names, for mission-critical applications. These applications aren't too visible because most of them exist entirely behind corporate firewalls, but they testify that Curl is in fact a trustworthy, industrial-strength platform. For this type of customer, breadth of deployment on the Internet is absolutely not the issue; the capability of the platform to host powerful, responsive applications is.

"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.

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.

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.

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

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