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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.


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