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.

For that last 2 years we have been tagging interesting RIA related

content using Delicious.  Our tag cloud which you can find under

the username CurlTech now has over 1,400 bookmarks. 

As such  it is a collection of RIA articles and blog posts relevant to

the market and technology trends.  I thought it would be useful to share

the content we tag weekly as itserves as a great bibliography for those doing

research on RIA.

We have been categorizing the content we find into three major groups:

• Business case for RIA

• Technology Comparisons

• RIA User Interfaces

Here is this weeks round up. . 

Business Case for RIA

Virtual Panel on \\\\\"The Current and Future State of RIA\\\\\"

Impact

By Staff Writer, March 04, 2009

InfoQ has just conducted a Virtual Panel on “The Current and Future State

of RIA” featuring the thoughts of many individuals from well‑known and

well‑respected companies in the space such as: Mozilla, Curl, Java,

Microsoft and Adobe. Each spokesperson was provided with a series of

questions relating to whether RIA technologies have “made it”, what the

optimal user experience of the RIA should be, what other applications

will be driving RIA technology adoption, as well as an overview of the

various RIA frameworks and languages.

It's Time To Update The Enterprise Software Licensee Bill of Rights!

Forrester

By Ray Wang, March 05, 2009

With the market now in favor of the enterprise software licensee, its now

time to update the Enterprise Software Licensee's Bill of Rights to

include newer topics such as virtualization, SaaS and subscription

pricing, newer usage based pricing models, open source, and vendor

lock-in avoidance. As mentioned in a call to action in a December 2008

Monday's Musings, this groundbreaking report, originally published in

December 2006, will be updated to reflect current market conditions.

The goal - improve this reusable contract negotiation model that cuts

across the 5 key phases of the software ownership life cycle:

RIA technologies and the downturn

ZDNet

By Ryan Stewart, March 05, 2009

The news is a pretty depressing place right now but there was a small

article in the Economist about how the Fashion industry is responding

to the downturn that caught my eye. Towards the end of the article the

Economist mentioned how designers are looking for ways to leverage

digital distribution:

Technology Comparisons

Flash is Dominating the Landscape, but Silverlight is Growing

InfoQ

By Abel Avram, March 10, 2009

A RIA statistics page is publishing the numbers of browsers having RIA

plug‑ins installed on a daily basis. The RIA space today is occupied by

Flash but Silverlight is catching up.

RIA User Interfaces

The Weekly RIA RoundUp for March 9

Inside RIA.com

By David Tucker, March 09, 2009

This week the Flex SDK gets some bug fixes, iLog releases a new set of

visualization components, the new version of jQuery UI was released,

Microsoft provides some guidance on Silverlight development, and a talk

on the future of Rich Internet Applications. All this and more on the

Weekly RIA RoundUp from InsideRIA.

Microsoft heralds Silverlight‑Eclipse link

Info World

By Paul Krill, March 09, 2009

Microsoft is touting support for its Silverlight multimedia application technology in the Eclipse open source tools platform.

Schwartz Explains Sun For You Part 2

SD Times

By Alex Handy, March 06, 2009

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has been laying out the case for his company's

future in his blog recently. Earlier this week, he gave a broad

overview of his three‑ or four‑part talk. This is part two of that

series. Go watch if you're interested in the company.

Framework for Flex Developers Goes Open Source

Dr. Dobb's Journal

By Staff Writer, March 05, 2009

Farata Systems has open sourced its Clear Toolkit 3.1 framework for developing

enterprise Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java. Sun

loses Apache and Spring vote on latest Enterprise Java

The Register

By Gavin Clarke, March 05, 2009

Updated:Sun Microsystems' rocky relationship with open source over Java is

again in the spotlight, after it lost support of two influential groups

for the latest update to enterprise Java.

I just saw a post on why enterprise applications suck.

It starts with this statement - There's a quality about some software that inspires love in their users, and it's totally devoid in enterprise software. The best you can ever say about enterprise software is when it doesn't get in the way of the business. At it's worst, enterprise software creates more work than it automates.

Therefore it's high time for enterprises to "modernize" their applications on a web architecture with very attractive user interface. Such applications must mimic the business process, not the other way around as evident from many of the packaged applications in use today. The vendor attitude seems to be - here is the application, now go adjust your process to fit into the idiosyncrasy of the application design. What an unnatural act!

Our experience with Curl in enterprise clients prove that visually attractive design on the web platform is the way to go, moving away from "fat client" architectures of the past, at very high cost. Take a look at another of  my blog posts in Sys-Con, discussing the vendor landscape in enterprise RIA.

Recently I was invited by Info-Q (Scott Delap) to participate in a virtual roundtable discussion on RIA. Other invitees are - Ryan Stewart (Adobe), Tim Sneath (Microsoft), Scott Stanfield (Vertigo), John Resig, Peter Pilgrim, and Didier Girard. The final roundtable discussion will happen and I am not sure if all the names will participate. But I was sent six questions to answer and I am posting my answers below.

1.  The web has been large dominated by "pages" and not "applications" despite the advent of RIA technologies.  In the last year we have seen the shift accelerate however with websites featuring "mini-applications" for video, interactive exploration, etc.  Given this change has RIA finally "made it".

JRD – I think there is much more RIA in the consumer space, as the need for moving from static refreshable pages (hence latency) to dynamic interactive applications is strong. For the enterprise RIA, there is no choice but to provide interactive and stateful transactional applications, as that’s what they are used to in the client-server model. However, enterprise RIA is yet to take off in the US. We see a lot more use in Japan for the Curl RIA platform.

2.  As RIA technologies have been introduced, portability has been stressed.  However, user demands are driving native integration with file systems, docks/taskbars, calendaring, and other os level items.  Do you think RIA platform will focus more on such integration in the next few years or continue to work towards interoperability instead?

JRD – Again, let us distinguish between consumer RIA vs. enterprise RIA. We see more interoperability needs than integration needs. Wherever we get benefit of the client OS (such as exploiting drivers for video rendering), Curl uses them for fast performance. The approach seems to be client-side integration and server side interoperability (incidentally Curl does not have any server-side code).

3.  Video is the largest application type driving RIA adoption at the moment.  What other types of applications to you see driving RIA technology adoption in the next 12-18 months.

JRD – We at Curl focus on web-based enterprise applications that demand high scalability, reliability, security, performance and predictability. The motivation is to switch over from client-server applications of last 15 years to a web based architecture that reduces TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) drastically. Frankly, video does not appear as a high priority for these applications at all. That is the reason why Curl has 400 large enterprises as customers running mission critical business applications. Not a single customer has deployed video.

4.  Given your target framework/language what is its greatest strength versus the rest of the field at the moment (Ajax, GWT, Curl, Flex, Silverlight, JavaFx, etc)?

JRD – Curl’s greatest strength is developer productivity (one language covers the entire spectrum of text, graphics, grids, as well as object oriented types and classes), and run-time advantages of scalability, very high volume of data handling, fast performance due to client-side compilation to machine code, and high security features. These are the basic requirements of all large enterprises for mission-critical applications for their business.

5.  Given your target framework/language what is its greatest weakness  versus the rest of the field at the moment?

JRD –Curl's greatest weakness is its relative obscurity.  Most of our customers have tried and failed with Ajax and Flex before discovering that Curl can solve their high performance and security needs. Also, video rendering is not one of our strengths as that was never a target.

6.  Most RIA languages are not used for both client and server development.  Typically backend work is done in PHP, Java, .NET, etc.  How do you see this polygot programming (http://memeagora.blogspot.com/2006/12/polyglot-programming.html) model effecting RIA?

JRD – I like the phrase Polyglot. Frankly it’s a mess. We observe that the world is polarizing to two-language schemes (e.g. C# & XAML; ActionScript & MXML; JavaFX & Java). One could argue that 2 is better than 4 and 4 is better than 6. But we at Curl believe in 1 language covering both the presentation stuff and the logic stuff. Hence the researchers at MIT designed one uniform language addressing the entire spectrum. This results in tremendous “programmer economy”, something we don’t seem to focus in the RIA world. Our customer experience substantiates this advantage greatly.

Curl is a great multi-paradigm language for building rich client applications. We hope you add it to your language repertoire.

While 2008 was a break out year for RIA technologies we expect 2009 to be even more exciting.  It was good to see the recognition that Ryan Stewart gave Curl in his recent ZDnet post Looking Ahead to 2009. Thanks Ryan. 

Over the last year we have considerably raised the visibility of Curl as the Enterprise RIA platform.  We have grown our customer base to over 400.  In 2009 we plan to continue to document the customer use cases to help highlight the bottom line business benefits of RIA adoption.

Over 2008 we made numerous releases and continued to deliver on our strategy build out our open source offering with

the WSDK (March 2008) and the CDK (July 2009).  We also introduced our Version 7 beta release code named Nitro that significantly improves the ease of installation for off-line desktop applications. Finally we added Eclipse support with the release of the CDE.  All in all it was a very busy and productive year. 

Already 2009 has started with a bang as we released the CDK-DS which have gotten considerable visibility. With the CDK-DS Curl now has and end to end story for data intensive applications.  Next up will be the release of version 7.

I just attended AjaxWorld 2008 in San Jose, California. The theme of this conference was "2008: Decision Year for RIAs". Here is a quick summary.

• The first day keynote was by Scott Guthrie of Microsoft. Scott manages the development platforms including Silverlight. He gave several demos. The first one showed ASP .Net MVC (Model View Controller), JQuery, and Visual Studio 2008. The second demo was Silverlight and RIA-based development. Silverlight claims cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in. The Linux version is done with Novell. Most of the examples were on video streaming at sites such as NBC Olympics, the DNC (Democratic National Convention). He claimed the NBC Olympics had 70 million streams in 14 day period. AOL mail was another example using Silverlight. Some SAP front-ends are now using Silverlight. He claimed one of every four PC's now run Silverlight, kind of hard to believe, specially when Silverlight Release 2 was launched lat week. I wrote a response to a blog post on this. Microsoft deserves credit for "adaptive streaming" on varieties of line speeds ranging from 250 kbps to 2 Mbps. They clearly focus on beating Adobe's Flash player in video streaming. The business application part of Silverlight is weak on examples and functions, but high on claims. Silverlight claims multi-language support like C#, VB, Python. They claim rich query of data and local caching. The download is 4.6 MB and everything fits in that (includes 100s of built-in controls). For example, they have HTML API for programming pure HTML apps. All functions like calendaring have skinnable controls. Visual Studio is their IDE. The combination of VS 2008 and Microsoft Expression addresses the designer+developer community.

• Matt Quinlan from Appcelerator stared by saying "users may times don't now what they want. If Ford would have asked users what they wanted, they would have a said 'a faster horse'". Appcelerator provides a framework to speed up Ajax development. It provides a higher order expression language that generates Javascript. He said Javascript is "mountains of code" and pointed out that Google Map has 6535 lines of Javascript code. He derided Javascript as tedious, error-prone, boiler-plate stuff. It was interesting that many presenters showed Ajax frameworks to speed of development.

• Oracle made a presence this time. They showed their existing tools such as JDeveloepr and ADF (Application Development Framework) all using some new technology. It's "old wine in a new bottle". There is no front-end client-centric RIA story. They are from a Java server-centric culture and are sticking to that.

• Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch presented on day 3 early (poor audience) and I missed that, but supect he glorified Adobe Flex and AIR.

• Curl got good visibility.  I presented on first day a session titled  "RIA - Real Examples and Lessons Learnt", where four concrete customer examples were described, showing benefits of using Curl. Then Richard and I gave an interview to Sys-Con TV (not published yet). I also participated at a power panel yesterday on the subject "How are RIAs benefiting the bottom line?" You can see the other participants including last minute addition of Adobe (James Ward). Our simple booth was busy with many visitors getting a demo of Curl from the expert hands of Richard.

This AjaxWorld had several hundred people (my guess - 400), many did

not show up due to the harsh economic condition prevailing now.

I went out last night and caught the late showing of The Dark Night. I love that Batmobile, but I can’t imagine driving it to work.  I would rather drive Bruce Wayne’s Lamborghini!  But even the Lamborghini is not exactly a utilitarian vehicle. I mean I can’t imagine taking my wife and four kids on a camping trip in a Lamborghini.  I would rather drive my Chevy Suburban.

The Batmobile, Lamborghini and the Suburban all have strengths and weakness depending on the context in which they are used. The fact is you have to choose the right vehicle for the job at hand. This is also true of RIA platforms.

Let say you have to enrich the user experience of a commercial shopping site like Amazon.com or The Gap. You are probably going to use something fairly lightweight like Ajax.  On the other hand, if you want to provide a beautiful animation for Disney you’ll use Flex or Silverlight, not Ajax.  Flex might be good for one site and Silverlight another. Ajax framework “X” here and Ajax framework “Y” there. You get the picture.

My platform of choice is Curl, a RIA platform that started as a DARPA funded research project at MIT more than a decade ago. As a RIA platform Curl is very mature and extremely powerful, but it’s not appropriate for all use cases. For example, I wouldn’t build a mass consumer web site with Curl because the Curl runtime is not very common. I would use Ajax or Flex instead.  At the same time I wouldn’t build a processing intensive data visualization tool or an advanced product configuration interface (think thousands of parts) using Ajax or Flex either. I would use Curl. 

Curl is a powerhouse; it is the Batmobile of the RIA platforms. But its most appropriate for enterprise and scientific computing - its not always the best choice for mass consumer applications. For mass consumer applications I would choose Flex, Silverlight or Ajax - these are the Lamborghinis and Suburbans of the RIA platforms.  Flex, Silverlight and Ajax are best suited, in my opinion, for every day use (Suburban) or for glitz and glam (Lamborghini), not for mission critical industrial strength jobs (Batmobile). For mission critical industrial strength jobs that require intensive processing and the ability to handle huge data sets I choose Curl.  

When you choose a RIA platform you have to consider many things and in many cases Ajax, Flash/Flex, or Silverlight will do the job nicely.  But there are occasions when you need something much more powerful and that’s when you should take a serious look at Curl.  Don’t drive the Batmobile to work and don’t drive the Suburban into a battle with evil. Use the right platform for the job.