LOGIN | REGISTER NOW | SUBSCRIBE
 
 
News on Monday
more>>
SharePoint Tech Report
more>>


   

 
 
Download Current Issue
ISSUE 7/1/2009 PDF

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Receive the print Edition?


 
Is the mystery Borland suitor Serena?
Borland software is considering an offer from another company after a preliminary deal with MicroFocus. Is Serena the new company?
06/30/2009 01:55 PM EST

Windows 7 - An eBayer's dream product?
Windows 7 pre-orders can make people money on eBay.
06/29/2009 03:48 PM EST

Know thine cloud provider
Cloud computing require companies to understand compliance and regulation. Third parties will play a big role in regulated industries.
06/29/2009 02:58 PM EST

 

Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conf.
7/13/2009 to 7/16/2009
New Orleans
Microsoft

OSCON (Open Source Convention)
7/20/2009 to 7/24/2009
San Jose
O'Reilly Media

XBRL Technology Workshop & Summit
7/28/2009 to 7/30/2009
Santa Clara
XBRL US

ACM SIGGRAPH
8/3/2009 to 8/7/2009
New Orleans
ACM SIGGRAPH

OpenSource World (formerly LinuxWorld)
8/12/2009 to 8/13/2009
San Francisco
IDG World Expo


 
print Printable version 
Most Read Latest News Blog Resources
Kapow automates website data retrieval
Kapow Technology's Web Data Server 7.0 can be used to create modules that navigate through...

Oracle's Fusion 11g lays groundwork for ERP platform
Fusion's components are standards-based and integrated, but some abilities are lost if non...

COBOL’s future lies in the clouds
After 50 years of use in businesses, COBOL is still lingering around mainframes. But the s...

Digg!  Digg
Reddit  Reddit
Slashdot  Slashdot
Share on facebook  Facebook
Share on Twitter  Twitter

Rich Internet Pioneer Ready to Ride Again


Curl says platform best for getting enterprise-class apps onto Web

By David Rubinstein
April 15, 2007 — 
A good curl will always bounce back. As such, Curl Corp., a rich Internet application (RIA) pioneer, is looking to bounce back into the consciousness of the North American market with the relaunch of its platform at the Web 2.0 Expo in mid-April.

Being positioned as a platform for business-critical, client/server applications, Curl isn’t just about eliminating page refreshes anymore. The platform, according to vice president of product strategy Richard Treadway, is best suited for applications that must be Web-enabled, require highly complex user interfaces, need support for enterprise-class data sets, and be high-performance and highly secure.

Curl was born out of an MIT content language project begun in 1995 and was an early advocate of what was then being called “the executable Internet.” The company was purchased by the Japanese software company Sumisho in 2000, and it has gained more than 300 customers in Asia for the Curl platform, which consists of the language, a runtime and an IDE.

“AJAX has limitations as a software development medium,” said Bert Halstead, the chief architect who has been with the company since 1998, when it was spun out of MIT. “It runs differently in every browser. [The developer] has no control over the delivery platform.”

Halstead said Curl believes there needs to be a set of features targeting how applications perform, in terms of speed, the size of data sets they can handle, whether you can work with them offline as well as online, and whether or not they scale. The object-oriented language is a rich one, Halstead said, for work with GUI layouts, markup text and scripting. “People who understand about object-oriented programming have no problem becoming productive in Curl,” he said.

He compared the runtime to Adobe’s Reader or Flash, with thousands of built-in APIs. As to the argument that requiring client software limits who can use the applications and how they can be used, Halstead said, “Enterprises don’t seem to complain about having to implement the runtime.” The IDE, Halstead said, includes a visual layout editor and source code control integration.

Halstead explained that when you click, for example, to launch an EIS application, the server recognizes the application as a Curl app and returns the application to the client, which invokes a Curl plug-in. The runtime compiles the EIS source code into a full EIS application that can exchange data with the server. “This approach economizes the work the server does,” Halstead said. “It’s not rendering pages; it’s just feeding data.” Curl can handle a myriad of protocols, he added.


Share this link: http://www.sdtimes.com/link/30491
 

Add comment


Name*
Email*  
Country     


  • Comment
  • Preview
Loading