Every RIA solution has its strengths and, in terms of application domain, its sweet spot. It's obvious to say this, but your specific requirements should dictate the RIA solution you use. You can't say which is better over all as they all have strengths in certain areas and weaknesses in others.

Your requirements, if I understand your post, is that the RIA solution should (a) provide the capability of doing smooth and flashy graphics and (b) the runtime should be as small as possible. All of the RIA solutions (e.g. Silverlight, Flash, Curl) are capable of providing smooth and flashy graphics. It's a matter of design skill rather than technology so this requirement is fulfilled by any of the usual suspects.

Your second point is a bit less clear to me. You say that the runtime should be small so that applications can be accessed from anywhere (e.g. public PC). In this case, Curl is clearly not the solution as it has a fairly large runtime (9 meg) that must be installed before Curl applications can be used. That said, Curl applications are typically smaller than Ajax or Flex applications (not sure about Silverlight). Curl applications are smaller for a number of reasons: because the runtime has so much functionality less is needed in the application; because the source code is naturally terse; because the applications are served as pure-text which is very compact when zipped up. So if your actual requirement is application size, than Curl is a great choice. If this requirement is reach - the availability of the runtime on arbitrary machines - than you have to go with Flash or Ajax.

Curl is an exemplary solution in the Enterprise where the audience is captive (you control or dictate what every user has on their machine) and when raw performance and security are of importance. In terms of performance Curl is an order of magnitude faster than Flex and (according to engineers at curl) about two orders of magnitude faster than Ajax. This makes a huge difference when you have to deal with lots of data (e.g. a table with tens-of-thousands of records, advanced data visualization, complex product configuration). Curl is also capable of handling a lot more data in memory than other solutions (e.g. hundreds-of-thousands of records). Finally, Curl's security model is extremely strong.

There are other advantages to Curl such as the ease-of-learning, the simplicity of the code, the rich feature set, the stability of the platform, etc. I could talk about those until I'm blue in the face and until this comment is the size of a short novel, but your second requirement is perhaps the most important qualifier. If you need small applications that can be downloaded quickly than Curl is an excellent solution. If you need a ubiquitous runtime than Flex or Ajax are better choices today.

I hope that helps.

Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.

Thank you all. I have gone through all the posts and the inline links for reference too like ...

1. http://www.garyrgilbert.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/4/21/Curl-VS-Adobe-Air
2. http://developers.curl.com/blogs/community_blog/2008/06/13/enterprise-ria-real-examples-in-use

So to be precise, what Curl claims is that... Its a RIA solution for Enterprise which can handle large set of data. But, all potential RIA applications are may not be Enterprise applications or even do not need such huge amount of data. So, that time we may have better choices opposed to Curl. So we need to choose the best RIA solution for individual RIA applications requirement. Even few replies to blogs have concern about the huge 9 MB RTE, again its only for one version (every Curl RTE version needs to be installed for applets written in different API versions ) I believe its the main hurdle for Curl to reach masses. But some members here advocates for the large set of packages available with the RTE, which contributes to the final size of the RTE. Can there be separate Curl RTE installer for incremental set of packages, like say, Minimal, Normal, Full versions of RTE (needs to be decided depending upon the most used packages) ? And about smooth graphics for UI objects, I think its depends upon the anti-aliasing implementation.

BTW, I have used the few demo AIR Flex/Flash, and Ajax applications like eBay Desktop, Yahoo Finance, Google Calendar, NASDAQ, AOL, FineTune, etc.... which I love to play with such rich UI applications with lots of transition, fading, animation effects. Can I have links to such kind of Curl applications ?

Thank you

Yes, Curl has identified the enterprise as its primary target, in no small part because we believe Curl's platform is much more well suited than other RIAs for enterprise-class applications. Of course the Curl platform could be used in many scenarios outside the enterprise as well, but every application has its own set of requirements that might or might not make Curl the right choice. The trade-off between RTE download size and application size is just one example.

And for whatever it's worth, Adobe's AIR installer is bigger than Curl's (the last AIR installer I saw was 12MB).

With regard to upgrading the runtime, you'll encounter the same problem with Flex/AIR applications that require a Flash Player or AIR upgrade. It's not a problem unique to Curl. Curl does, however, have a strong versioning story. Curl applications written for a specific API can run happily on a client machine that has since upgraded their runtime (say from 6.0 to 6.0 & 7.0). The "old" RTE still exists on the machine unless the user specifically uninstalls it (I have versions 7.0.0-beta, 6.0.2, 5.0.2, 4.0.4, 3.0.8, and 2.0.8 all at my disposal on my machine). Moreover, application developers don't have to change their applications' API version just because there's a new Curl RTE release available. Sure, if there's a feature or fix in a new release that you want to make available to customers using your old (e.g., 6.0 API) application, you can ask or require them to upgrade, but it's not necessary. In fact an application can be written to support multiple RTEs simultaneously and behave the right way according to whichever RTE is available on the client machine. Multi-API applications aren't always the right choice, but it offers one way to amortize the upgrade process.

It is worth remembering (at least from Curl's perspective) that Flash wasn't born in the browser either. It took a variety of "Frog in a Blender" type Flash applications to get things kick-started, and presumably a lot of hard work by Macromedia/Adobe to keep the momentum going, before they reached the penetration level they're at today. Viral marketing goes a long way. If you've got cool application ideas in mind, go right ahead and implement them then put the word out. We're trying to do out part, and we're hoping a vibrant developer community can help us while we help them.

For a nice effects you can have a look at the following. It requires Curl 7.0 (beta), and a reasonably well populated Facebook account, but the design and effects are pretty cool.

http://developers.curl.com/blogs/community_blog/2008/06/06/curlgraph-a-sample-curl-nitro-desktop-application

http://developers.curl.com/docs/DOC-1241

Hi Utkal,

I just came across these demos eventhough they might not be flashy:)

http://www.curlap.com/html/solutions/demo/stock-chart/ex-stock-chart.curl

http://www.curl.com/solutions/demos/standalone/start.curl (give any username/password)

http://km0330.keymachine.de/friedger/html/

http://km0330.keymachine.de/nils/curl/cfl/demos/spine/start.curl

http://km0330.keymachine.de/friedger/clp/start.curl

Found this:

http://www.curl.com/demos/raytrace/tutorial.curl

Nice animation at the end of the page.

Friends

yesterday first time i saw and played with a Mac notebook at my friends house. Really its a wonderful piece of h/w with ultimate UI which is value for money. I really like the UI of its applications with wonderful piece of UI effects. can we write such kinda apps in Curl ?

WOW !
Native look-n-feel supported in Nitro ! Its a gr8 news as user should have flexibility to choose the look-n-feel he/she likes not restricting him/her to a same look-n-feel.

BTW, I have mentioned about the graphical EFFECTs (transition, flying, fading, etc ...), not about the widget. No doubt widgets are good, but more than that I had impressed with the effects of each and every UI items.

Thank you

Modified: Hmmm.... No native look on WinXP I think I took it wrong.