Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Sales Dashboard: A Sample Curl Nitro Desktop Application

cheese — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:07:31 GMT

I have posted the Sales Dashboard Nitro sample application. It is described in the

Curl Nitro Sample Application: Sales Dashboard

article in our Widgets/Gadgets/Curlets section.

The Curl Sales Dashboard demonstration is a Curl implementation of a sales dashboard designed by Stephen Few of Perceptual Edge. We used it as a demo at the Web 2.0 Expo this past April. The application installs an entry on your Start menu and can also install a desktop icon so you can easily start it up. It runs in safe mode inside the Curl sandbox, so you don't have to give it full access to your machine.

The full source code for the application is attached, so you can extend it further.

RMH was kind enough to create a video demonstrating the installation and use of the Sales Dashboard. You can view the video here: Sales Dashboard video

Mid-year Update on Curl Inc.

jnan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:03:35 GMT

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

Why CIO's think their application developers are clueless?

jnan — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:13:25 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.

Rich Internet Applications Death Match!

RMH — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 14:01:21 GMT

Rob Gonda has proposed a RIA panel discussion that will pit panelists from Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex, Curl and other RIA platforms against each other to the death! Ok, maybe not to the death but it should be interesting all the same! The panel discussion, titled "Rich Internet Applications Death Match" is proposed for the SXSW Interactive Festival scheduled in March of 2009. We would really like to see this panel happen but its up to you to decide. I encourage everyone in our community to go to the Interactive Panel Picker at the SXSW conference web site and vote for this discussion. It will be a great opportunity to compare and contrast the different RIA platforms and for everyone to learn more about Curl!

Professional Web Based Training Courses in Curl for Free!

RMH — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 02:20:58 GMT

Curl, Inc. is excited to announce to our community that we have made a set of extensive professional Web Based Training (WBT) courses available to all Curl Developer Center members for free. These materials have been used by Curl to train developers both over the web and in the class room. There are three courses: Curl Fundamentals, Visual Layout Editor, and Application Development, all of which provide easy to follow succinct explanations of how to write programs in Curl with plenty of examples and even workspace where you can write Curl code directly into your browser and see it execute - no IDE required!

Visit the Training Center - Members Training section to access these courses. If you are not a member you'll need to join first, but it's easy and also free. Just click here to join!

The courses are easy to use but to help folks get started right away we've prepared a five minute video that explains how to use the WBT. Watch the video and get started today! (click in the middle of the blurred image to see the video)

A second iteration and a first alternative

rshiplett — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:30:44 GMT

My second iteration has added another TocDocument but this one has a procedure to populate an index entry and its pages.

That procedure might also be a place to add the values to a printable container should a user wish to print the index.

The procedure definition below follows the declaration of 2 variables which we will populate on each call.

{let public v1:#Visual, v2:#Visual}
{define-proc public {idx-entry entry:String, pages:String}:(Visual, Visual)

The procedure returns two visual objects which ensures that all entries and pages are formatted with the same look-n-feel.

A typical call might be

{set (v1, v2) = {idx-entry "parse", "369"}}
{heading level=4, {value v1}}
{heading level=5, {value v2}}

which is often preferrable to the simpler, error-prone and no-fun-to-maintain repetition of sequences such as

{heading
level=4,
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.25in,
{bold parse}
}
}
{heading
level=5,
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.50in,
{text
text-preserve-whitespace?=true,
text-breakable?=false,
369
}
}
}

for each entry.

With the simple abstraction which the procedure provides, we can change the layout in one place and we can consider adding a facility such that the user could customize the index and retain their changes as client-side persistent data. All of which points to a role for Curl in The-Future-of-the-Book, n'est-pas?

The complete procedure follows:

{define-proc public {idx-entry entry:String, pages:String}:(Visual, Visual) || TocTreeItem
{return
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.25in,
{bold {value entry}}},
{paragraph
paragraph-left-indent = 0.50in,
{text
text-preserve-whitespace?=true,
text-breakable?=false,
{value pages}
}
}
}
}

You no doubt see many opportunities to improve this (the user is required to remember to add spaces between page numbers or otherwise format the string of page numbers; there are no options yet to control the font, emphasis etc)

Curl is now in the Top 4

RMH — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:31:38 GMT

It's been rewarding watching the Curl customer base grow and seeing its adoption gaining more speed as each month passes by. When people talk about the leading RIA solutions (i.e. Flex, Silverlight, JavaFX) you will almost always here them talk about Curl as well. For example, in eWeek last week (print edition only) Darryl Taft listed Curl ( along with Adobe Flash and AIR, Microsoft Silverlight, Sun JavaFX and Mozilla Prism) as leading the pack among top competitors in the RIA space. The RIA community understands that Curl is a powerful solution for the enterprise and a top contender in the RIA market place.

Beginning of a Curl link at a Yahoo-hosted site

rshiplett — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:27:54 GMT

Folks,

Within the limits of a personal Curl license, I have started testing some Curl pages over at my www.LogiqueWerks.com

I'll try to keep y'all posted here at this blog of progress and hiccups at that site.

The next page up will be a TocDocument to supplement the index of one of the available books on Curl.

In the past my Curl blogs were at www.eclectic-pencil.com and www.eclectic-pencil.blogspot.com but very likely now they will be home to my related interests in Smalltalk, Rebol, Icon, Unicon, Converge, Oz, Jython and such while my Curl blogging moves to this address.

There are two open source modules for Python that I intend to port to Curl, so their progress should also track from this blog.

Cheers

Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE) is now Available!

RMH — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:59:29 GMT

At long last and after an herculean effort by our engineering team, we are proud to tell you that we have released the Curl CDE! The new Eclipse-based Curl IDE is really cool and for someone who is already familiar with Eclipse it will be a big step up. Our other Curl IDE, which is written entirely in Curl, will continue to be maintained for the foreseeable future but new capabilities and features will be added to the Curl CDE only. The Curl CDE is the future for our development community. It was chosen because the Eclipse platform is the platform used predominately by our customers and our customers want Curl to plug-in to that environment. We also benefit from the huge ecosystem surrounding Curl. We don't have to invent every new feature but can leverage existing Eclipse plug-ins. It's all good!

If you want to get started using the new Eclipsed-based Curl IDE (Curl CDE) you can download it from our web site now - this is the final release not a beta.
Download the Curl CDE

You should make sure before you download the Curl CDE that you follow the Installation Notes - there is a little bit of footwork required to get the plug-in working as is typical of Eclipse plug-ins.
Read the Installation Notes

If you have questions about how to use the Curl CDE there is documentation available directly from the CDE and you can also use the "Ask-the-Expert" forum. Remember: In the Curl forum there are no stupid questions and there are no stupid answers! Ask any Curl related question you want and it will be answered as quickly as possible.
Ask-the-Expert Forum

Backward Compatability and Curl

RMH — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 09:49:38 GMT

In an article I wrote for InsideRIA I asked "is backward compatibility important for a RIA platform". Curl doesn't build its runtimes to be "guaranteed" to be backward compatable - we use a different approach which we believe is better for our product and our customers. I spoke with David Kranz and Bert Halstead and got more details from them. The following is derived from emails from both those folks and should provide you with more details about Curl's backward compatibility story.

According to Bert and David:

There are several issues that are wrapped up in the notion of "backward compatibility" with regard to a platform, as opposed to an application. One is what happens when a user upgrades the platform. What happens to the existing applications running on that platform? We hope the answer is that they keep running. This can be accomplished in one of two ways.

One common way is that the new version of the platform replaces the old version and that the new version cannot change the existing behavior. This is the way browser-based platforms generally work, as well as operating system upgrades. This makes it difficult for a platform to evolve and also places a huge testing burden on the platform. And since it is so hard to achieve true, 100% compatibility, it also forces application developers with mission-critical applications to constantly make sure their applications work on new versions of the platform their application uses because a new version may be installed "underneath" the application, possibly causing it to break. Moreover, none of the other platforms are fully backward compatible -- Adobe has made various changes in ActionScript, Silverlight 1.0 and 2.0 are very different, if Java ever removes any of the deprecated APIs, like they say they will, then it won't be backward compatible either," etc. So promising backward compatablity and executing on the promise are two different things.

The other way to make sure that applications developed for older versions of a platform keep running is "side-by-side" versioning. This is the approach taken by platforms such as Visual Basic, and Curl. In this case an application is built to run on a particular version. When the user installs a new version, they do not replace the older one. Until they are upgraded, old applications use the old version of the platform and so are sure to keep working. New and older applications both continue to work. One advantage of this approach is that developers do not have to worry about how their application runs on new versions of the platform until they want to upgrade.
Another advantage is that the platform is not required to be 100% compatible.

Of course, any incompatible change is a potential burden to developers and should be avoided unless developers are provided with important functionality in exchange for possibly having to make some code changes when they upgrade. Curl's policy, which is to evolve APIs, even from one major version to the next, in a backward-compatible way whenever there is any reasonable way to do it.

For an enterprise, our approach to "side-by-side" versioning is a big advantage or the enterprise. It allows an unterprise be able to run applications without upgrading for as long as they want, and not have to suffer a forced upgrade of all of their applications just because they have some new application they want to use. It is also a big advantage to be using a platform that can evolve without the burden of having to make sure that all existing applications running on the platform behave in exactly the same way with the new versions.