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Curl and Literary Web Content

rshiplett — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:58:56 GMT

This Curl blog has been a bit quiet .. it's not just my wait for Curl 8.0 ... By way of an update, my current activities are in the area of literary web content, particularly the "artist book", interactive alternative translations and "view-only" literary content.

My current small project concerns "Bild" poems as web content - such as those of Kurt Schwitters (died 1948) . The immediate problem tends to be fonts: the choice of font could not be more critical than in Schwitters' "Gesetztes Bildgedicht", a composition of boxes and letters within a single box frame.

There is a proposal for at least one Literary Markup Language (Dr. O. Hoffmann) and there is the Adobe Text project, but, in an academic and research context, no option has appeared as interesting to me than that of Curl.

In the case of poetry translations, it is not so much a question of technical problems. For insight into some of the issues, there is the article by Mark Rudman in his "The Book of Samuel" on the translation/collaborations of Milosz (Polish/English) and Brodsky (Russian/English). Alternative translations, like selective translation, require more than Google Translate when literature is the content. Take any 20th Century Russian poem for which you have a reputable translation, feed the original into Google Translate and see the result. If its result impresses you in the least, feed that result in as English and note the Russian output.

In the case of Google books, when reading a typical scanned text in a foreign language, you have no easy path to alternative translations. Even if you doubted the merits of a given translation, the web is not so "semantic" as to offer any easy path to an audio version of the poem read aloud by author or a fellow poet, let a lone a reading of the translation.

A visit to any academic web site with a focus on literary content can be a sobering experience.

If you have interests in literature as web content - whether in archives, publishing, "viewing" or "web reading", multimedia other - please post a reply or send me a note.

I am also following a few other programming languages as regards literature and art on the web: one is also from MIT, as was Curl. As an environment and not merely a programming language, I only see one interesting competitor to Curl - and despite its history with Apple, it is also not yet available on the iPad. Two of the languages have only recently arrived at UNICODE and neither offer an IDE. Only one offers an alternative to regular expressions.

Here is an approximation of Schwitters: "Gesetztes Bildgedicht"

My previous poetry markup example in Curl can be seen here.

The Benefits of Visualization

richard — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 21:39:12 GMT

John Sviokla in a recent Harvard Business Review blog post highlights the benefits of good visualization in understanding data. His post is appropriately titled "Swimming in Data? Three Benefits of Visualization" The three benefits he explains are as follows.

Efficiency - good visualizations let you understand the data much more quickly. This is something I have pointed out as a prime ROI benefit
New Insight - By combining different data into a single visualization we can gain additional insight. This is convincingly demonstrated with Curl's EyeDecide demo
Answering Key Questions - Good visualizations let you see answers to complex questions easily and quickly

Open source Curl projects from curlap.com

rshiplett — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 18:04:10 GMT

Not all Curl open source projects are visible here at developers.curl.com

My favorite page with links to sourceforge.net Curl projects is at code.google.com/p/curl-orb

There are 4 projects from the Curl folks in Japan with handy links on that one page:

Curl Object Request Broker (for server-side Java POJO's)

Curl Advanced UI (Curl Visual Controls)

Curl Sonntag (Curl MVC Framework)

Curl Lib (Curl non visual Libraries)

I think that all of these projects have had new releases since they were first mentioned in our pages here.

If you are aware of another project from Japan or Korea or elsewhere, please add a reply to this post.

Enterprise 2.0 Application Security Risks

richard — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:12:00 GMT

Recently PaloAlto Networks published a survey Social Networking Usage Explodes In Businesses Worldwide that found 27 different social networking applications in use across 95% of the participating organizations. The survey findings are based on actual analysis of application traffic, not survey questions. The following chart from the report shows that the most prominent use is Instant Messaging at 50%.

The survey makes the point that applications are not threats ? yet they carry risks.

"The adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications is being driven by users, not by IT. The ease with which they can be accessed, combined with the fact that newer (younger) employees are accustomed to using them, points toward a continuation of this trend. The somewhat disconcerting fact is that users do not take into account the business and security risks that these applications present. Looking at the 202 Enterprise 2.0 applications found, 70% can transfer files, 28% are known to propagate malware, and 64% have known vulnerabilities."

All this points to increased security risks as more enterprise 2.0 applications see more pervasive adoption. As we have previously pointed out it is important that developers and IT operations both understand best practices with regard to security. Jeffrey Hammond points out in his paper on Securing Rich Internet Applications that is is important to understand the 3 Attack Surfaces: Server-side, Communication-stream and Client-side. In this post I'll focus on the client-side.

RIA frameworks use a Sandbox model the protect clients from malicious code. It is important to realize however that not all sand boxes are created equal. While Ajax, browser based applications use the browser's sandbox, RIA frameworks like AIR, Silverlight and Curl use their own security model and permit access to the local machine. It's natural that developers want to take advantage of the broader capabilities at RIA frameworks offer over the browser based sandbox but they need to be aware of how their decisions effect the vulnerabilities that these frameworks introduce.

To give administrators and application developers the most control over security for creating and deploying Enterprise 2.0 applications Curl supports both un-privileged and privileged modes executing in the browser and on the desktop. This is in contrast to AIR that allows only un-privileged in the browser and only privileged on the desktop. The follow table shows the differences between Curl and AIR privilege options.

Curl Desktop applications use the same security model as Curl applets that run in the browser. Additionally un-privileged applets can access their own area on the local disk to offer improved performance and a better user experience but present a much lower risk profile This also means that application developers can write un-privileged applications that make use of local storage and run both in the browser and standalone on the desktop.

Use Tactical Urgency to Introduce New Technologies

richard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 00:19:04 GMT

Recently Kelly Emo, SOA Product Marketing Manager at HP Software wrote in her post "Is your SOA in Action? Four ways to keep it that way.." One element she offers in her "Obvious Insite # 3" is to use your SOA governance to drive adoption of new technologies such as RIA and Cloud Computing.

Much of my work over the last decade in getting new technologies adopted by enterprise IT has been under the proverbial banner of "Herding Cats". I have learned is that it is very hard to introduce new technology as part of the strategic plan and that SOA governance is often more of a roadblock than a driver.

Technologies that help integrate data between silos require the endorsement of too many chiefs and even with executive stakeholder support strategic efforts can fail under the urgency of immediate problems. In my experience with technology adoption of RIAs and EBSs from both the vendor and purchaser point of view I have found that even with a strong business imperative the inevitable urgency of tactical requirements derails the best strategic plans.

A better approach is to use a tactical urgency to demonstrate a real benefit. In this way it is possible to establish a beach head through a small project that demonstrates a believable ROI. From there you can position the technology successfully in the broader strategy.

Visualize Your Facebook Relationships - CurlGraph

richard — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:54:38 GMT

Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the year. The Mary Meeker: Facebook Is Eating Your Lunch And Dinner post at All Facebook singles out the statistic from her presentation at Web2.0 that Facebook is the largest share gainer of online usage over the past 3 years. Indeed at over 300M users, if Facebook were a country it would be the forth largest behind only China, India and the US.

With all the hype on social networking I thought it would be interesting to highlight again our own CurlGraph. The CurlGraph is a fun application that shows how your Facebook friends are related to each other. If you are on Facebook I urge you to give it a try and to suggest it to your friends.

I made a brief demo video you can post to Facebook and you'll find the Curl website has instructions on installation.

Risks In The Cloud

richard — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:26:01 GMT

The Internet is buzzing today with the news that Microsoft subsidiary Danger has lost the server stored data on T-Mobile's Sidekick phones. See Did Microsoft Just Kill the Cloud? and Sidekick outage says more about the future of 'Pink' than Microsoft's cloud and The cloud: no place for amateurs

While there are not a lot of Sidekick users out there this incident has once a gain forced the question: How safe is your data in the cloud?

Have we developed a false sense of security as we depend more and more on data out of our immediate control on servers managed by Google, Salesforce, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter? I dare say not many of us has thought through a disaster recovery plan if all our emails, contacts, photos and documents were to disappear overnight.

The Power Law of Social Networks

richard — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:58:39 GMT

Yesterday Dion Hinchcliffe lists 22 Power Laws of the Emerging Economy. It's an interesting post worth a read but I think he omitted one of the most important "The Power Law of Social Networks" Social Networks themselves are defined by a power curve. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrates this in his book "Linked, The New Science of Networks." This interconnectivity drives the information age where popular nodes can rise up quickly. Like all social networks the Internet has a few nodes with millions of connections and millions of nodes with very few connections. Increasingly 6 degrees of separation is becoming 3 degrees of separation.

RIA And The Cloud

richard — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:10:41 GMT

There is no doubt that Cloud Computing is getting a lot of attention. I first wrote about RIA and the Cloud back in April and now with real projects in play we're past Larry's rants on "what the hell is it" and onto how is it effecting web application architecture.

Yesterday in a conversation with Forrester's Jeffrey Hammond he told us he is seeing 2 ways in which Cloud computing is being implemented in IT.

As a cost saving measure moving computing to the cloud - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
To scale out applications providing services that can respond on demand.

The second case is prompting a re-thinking of web application architectures. Getting on demand services from the Cloud means the application's state needs to move to the closer to the Cloud's edge. This is where a Desktop RIA is perfect. A Desktop RIA can maintain state, run off-line and manage use of the Cloud's services.

Curl eyeDecide Application Review

richard — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:56:14 GMT

Last week we presented a review of the implementation of the Curl eyeDecide application to Jeffrey Hammond at Forrester. I have posted the presentation here.

Presenting were Doug Mcrae and John Chisholm (Cheese) from Curl and Juhan Sonin from Involution Studios.

As a developer himself, I think Jeffery enjoyed hearing from the people who actually did the work. I'm sure most of his days as an analyst are filled with discussion of trends and features rather actual design and coding techniques.

Curl eyeDecide was a team effort between Curl and Involution Studios, a top application UI design firm. The complete team included Juhan from Involution and Doug and Cheese from Curl. It took 6 months from conception to press release that included 4 months of implementation. That amounted to 30 work weeks and resulted in 20K lines of code.

The development cycle was collaborative and iterative and featured Curl's ability to code and deploy with a total of 50 distinct releases. The development started with connectivity to the data and the UI design was driven by the actual user experience of the testers at each release.

Some key learnings were that design and development should occur over the life of the project in an iterative cycle. Additionally professional graphic and UI design matters and having Juhan involved in developing not only the looks but the user experience from the beginning was paramount. Another important lesson is to clearly understand the data, its values and what people will want to do early in the process.

You can get the complete eyeDecide application in source form here.

Beyond HTML5

rshiplett — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:31:55 GMT

There seems to be some misunderstanding about the internet. The misconception is not about who "invented" it, but about what the internet is. When I first encountered the net in Montreal in about 1980, the network was being used by researchers to get messages from colleagues while off campus in Europe (I think it was BitNet and NetNorth but it was just basic text mail and maybe TeX documents via uucp.)

My thesis is that whatever the internet has become, it was not essentially HTML then or now. HTTP is "hypertext" transport protocol and perhaps should have become MCTP for "MIME-typed Content" tp. HTML itself ceased to be essentially "hyper-text" long ago (if we are to mean now what was meant by "hyper-text" back then.)

Last night I visited amazon.com and discovered the vast amount of research literature available as HTML ( it is a content type that amazon offers along with PDF and other e-content formats.) That followed a vist to flatland.com which took me back to the age of Samuel Pepys in London. In his diary he records his purchases of paper and the payments to have paper lined and the acquisition of presses in which to keep his books. On a visit to flatland I see the future: only the wealthy student will be able to afford a bound, hardcover textbook (another - and I think better - approach at cengage.com is to rent the textbook.)

What was valuable in books of old were the annotations, the marginalia (In the case of Judaism, these are the basis for the teachings of an entire tradition.) Not to mention the existence of palimpsest.

This week I begin work on an annotations-friendly Curl "browser" for the original wiki at c2.com - in that "browser" the content will be Curl, and not HTML (the c2.com content wiki pages are, in fact, root-less xhtml of a sort: tag-balanced XHTML-style markup without the root HTML element and are easily parsed as Curl.)

Some think that HTML5 will be the end of Adobe Flash in our browsers. I have my doubts. I envision the coming displacement of both HTML and the browser. The client end of the internet is not a browser any more than the server end is of necessity an Apache server. Simply stated, the client end is an HttpRequest and the server end is an HttpResponse. Add security, local data and async requests and you can have smart and useful software for consuming copyright material. We call it the Curl platform.

I remember when we were waiting for Lotus 1-2-3 to move from assembler to C for some AT&T 3B2 unix boxes - and that was in 1989. The move to 'C' was going to be a big deal. What became of that indispensable "wk" format? Gone the way of WordPerfect. And this for the application that displaced Visicalc as the reason a business required a PC.

The internet is not essentially this or that. It is evolving and arguably corresponds to no natural kind of the social or biological world prior to its emergence. Content on the internet which is HTML from various sources - such as research papers purchased at Amazon - when browsed in a conventional web browser are quite impoverished as hyper-text content. Such research papers when opened in smart software as Curl content can offer very rich features for cross-referencing, annotations, persisting marginalia, collaboration and more. It is not enough that browsers offer an option to "edit" HTML content in place.

While we cannot see what the future of the book will be, the future for the Curl web content language can be very bright if the opportunities are seen and seized. Free content is not the answer. Quality journalism is not free any more than fine films, custom training and college instruction or pertinent peer-reviewed research.

Enterprise RIA and Cloud Computing

richard — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:19:01 GMT

Dion Hinchcliffe recently pointed out in his post "Eight Ways Cloud Computing Will Effect Your Business" that we are in a delicate balance between risk and benefit when it comes to cloud computing. There is no doubt that interest in Cloud Computing has risen dramatically in the last year as shown in the Google Trends graph above. With cloud interoperability advancing and more dependable services becoming available, enterprise computing architectures are evolving to take advantage of the improved scale and cost Cloud Computing promises.

The trend to Cloud Computing represents a real opportunity for Enterprise RIA technologies to be the "User Interface" into the cloud based services. With the emergence of the "RIA Fit Client" that installs web-based applications on the desktop and allows off-line operation it is possible to see an "RIA - Cloud Computing" model is a viable alternative to the more expensive client-server. Indeed in our customer engagements we are seeing client-server applications (mostly VB) convert to RIA to get the benefits of web delivery without sacrificing the quality of user experience.

I was surprised to learn in a recent strategy session with Jeffrey Hammond of Forrester that 47% of new development is still client-server. Those efforts should seriously consider an RIA based approach. Today's Enterprise RIA platforms, like Curl meet all the requirements of communicating efficiently and securely with data services in the cloud or the enterprise and should be considered a viable alternative to client-server.

Lets All Help Get The Curl Word Out

richard — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:40:37 GMT

Recently Rajiv pointed to the lack of publicity Curl garners. I responed to that thread but I felt it worth repeating as a blog post.

While Curl is owned by SCS a large ($1.6B) Software and Systems Integrator in Japan it is small compared its main rivals Abobe and Microsoft. With a limited budget we have gained good visibility in the US over the last 2 years. This includes being named RIA technology of the year in 2008 by InfoWorld. We have over 400 customers world wide providing real enterprise solutions in large companies like Toyota, SONY and Panasonic. Over the last year we grew the Curl business and will have more interesting use cases to share in the near future.

We have been working with Jeffrey Hammond at Forester to help us position Curl in the RIA landscape. From Jeffery's inquiry profile Curl is in the mix when enterprises consider RIA technologies. We expect Curl will be part of an RIA Wave report from Forrester later this year.

Unfortunately with the current economic climate the Curl marketing budget does not support expensive advertising and trade show sponsorships.

But let's not let that dampen our enthusiasm. This developer center represents THE Curl community and we should all take it upon ourselves to spread the word about Curl. Curl has a great story to tell with very compelling proof points. We have a wealth of marketing material that each of us can use to spread the word. I have been on hundreds of sales calls and I can tell you that our story is well received and people readily see the benefits of Curl through our demos and case studies.

Lets all work together to get the word out about Curl. Follow the lead of active community members like Friedger Müffke, Robert Shiplett and Utkal R. Pradhan

If you see and opportunity to comment on an article or blog post please do so. If you see an opportunity to present Curl at a regional event please do so. If you need help with putting material together, let me know I can help.

So go forth and spread the word about Curl.

Curl and the grid widget: q-tec FastGrid

rshiplett — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:49:04 GMT

Every programming language used for enterprise RIA tends to face the same need: provide a sophisticated grid widget.

Applications which involve any detail on business workflow, logistics or other detailed management tasks inevitably involve a grid widget.

The demand on the widget can be considerable: if the data to be displayed results from SQL's LEFT OUTER JOIN the y-axis of the widget may have to present a tree structure.

Very often even ISV's find themselves purchasing not just a license for a third-party widget but the source-code so as to alter or fine-tune the widget.

Curl has very powerful grid facilities but also has a Curl ISV providing a grid widget: the Qualitech FastGrid from q-tec.com

From the QualiTech information at aboutus.org you can obtain more information in English about this Japanese Curl ISV.

Some of the API is revealed at fullsource.net and might be a candidate for an API entry at programmableweb.com

It might be interesting to note that the code example is copyrighted by both QualiTech and the Korean firm QTI.

Most Developers Building Web Applications

richard — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 18:22:42 GMT

Building web applications is where it's at. 65% of new custom applications are Web-apps accoording to Forrester's survery of software decision makers in North America and Europe. It's also interesting to note that there are still a lot (second most at 47%) of Client-server applications in play. Those folks should seriously look at desktop RIA's such as Curl as a better alternative. See the attached chart.