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Curling Up With Web Applications


Surge development environment optimized for performance, efficiency

By David Rubinstein
August 1, 2001 — 
Improving upon its technology for developing and delivering Web applications that execute on the local client, Curl Corp. has updated its Surge development environment to reduce the size of file download, improve runtime performance, and fine-tune its user interface.

Surge 1.1, according to marketing vice president Bob Batty, is the first iteration of a long-term strategy to improve the quality of the downloaded application. "We address things like load time, runtime, and…making downloads of content more efficient," he said. Batty claimed that when applications are constructed in the Curl Content Language, users bring down only the functionality they need, resulting in a shorter delay before the application begins executing. Surge is a full object-oriented programming environment that unites scripting, markup and graphics and allows developers to maintain code in one place, he said, which allows companies to reduce the cost of maintaining the client side of applications by delivering only the changes needed to the client.

Improvements to the graphical user interface provide greater forms capability for developers, he said. Other new features are backward compatibility, meaning the client piece of Surge does not have to be downloaded every time a new version comes to market; the Surge engine contacts the Curl Web site and brings down only those libraries necessary for a specific application. "This is a convenience that anyone who has ever downloaded [Adobe's] Acrobat or [Macromedia's] Flash can appreciate," he said.

Another key new feature, he said, is support for double word data types, so large financial or scientific institutions can use the Surge environment for the handling of very large numbers.

"This really represents a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to the Internet," said Peter O'Kelley, an analyst with the Patricia Seybold Group. "As things get more distributed, being able to get the power of the client will become even more important."

While Curl is not alone in claiming a vision of an "executable Internet"-companies such as Kenamea and REBOL have comparable offerings in the market-O'Kelley claimed that Curl is singularly focused on distributed Web applications. "One might argue it's a good synthesis of an alternative to Java or .NET. Curl is not trying to be the entire continuum," he added.

Curl (www.curl.com) is approaching academic institutions to develop Curl applications, offering monetary awards for the best applications developed by August 2002. Also, a CurlWorld Conference is set for January 2002 at which Web pioneer and Curl co-founder Timothy Berners-Lee is expected to speak.

"If they can deliver the productivity results they say," O'Kelley said, "they'll get a lot of attention with some killer case studies."


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