Curl Adds Muscle to the Web

Surge suite makes Internet executable from client

By David Rubinstein

May 1, 2001 —

The key to a rich, robust Internet experience, according to the engineers at Curl Corp., is compiled code, not interpreted code. Curl has released Surge 1.0, a software runtime environment that it says provides users with rich graphics, faster rapid response times and a reduction in the size of content to accelerate downloads.

Curl content is delivered over the Internet in source-code form, said Bob Batty, Curl's vice president of sales and marketing, much like HTML. The difference is that where Flash or Java is compiled to some intermediate stage, Curl is compiled at a client-side plug-in, creating in effect an "executable Internet"-a term coined by Forrester Research analyst George Colony and brought to fruition by Curl, Batty explained.

For developers, Batty said that Curl is not only a scripting environment, but a full object-oriented programming environment, with the Surge runtime and Surge Lab IDE based on the Curl Content Language, which unites scripting, markup and graphics into one environment. "To use Curl in an object-oriented sense, you need to be an accomplished C++ or Java programmer," he said. "But if you're an HTML programmer, you can do as much with Curl as you're doing now."

Underpinning the Web experience, Batty said, is industrywide adoption of standards such as SOAP, XML and UDDI-but even there, compliance with those standards isn't perfect and that can create difficulties. For example, Microsoft's SOAP, he claimed, is somewhat different from Apache's SOAP. "The success of Web services demands a very clean public API," Batty said, "so different objects from different vendors can talk. If not, it's a waste of time and we're back to EDI. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum for the requirement of interoperability." Implementations of current Web standards can be created in the Curl environment now, he said.

The Curl project began in 1995 at MIT to identify a software substrate to the hardware substrate known as the Internet, Batty said. The project allowed researchers to assume the Web did not exist and to throw out existing notions of how things work. In 1998, when the decision was made to embrace and extend existing technology, Curl was spun out of MIT into a private corporation, bringing with it Dr. Michael Dertouzos, the director of the MIT lab for computer science; Dr. Steven Ward, who with Dertouzos was behind the original Curl project; and Timothy Berners-Lee, who essentially invented the Web and is the director of the W3C.

Curl's marketing plans are to go after vertical markets, Batty said. Curl will play best in the entertainment industry, which relies on graphics; the financial services sector, with its charting and calculations performed on the client; the publishing industry, with its hyperlinks for interactivity; content aggregators, which create transactions that now suffer from time delays; and the travel and hospitality industry, which generates online ordering and ticketing. It is in these areas, he said, that Curl's client-side architecture will show increased performance and a better Web experience. Messages are sent between the client and server, without the page having to be rebuilt every time something else is clicked on, Batty said. The compiled page or package sits in a cache on the client, as the interface is separated from the data, providing what Batty called an "order of magnitude increase in performance."

Users will be able to personalize their Web experiences because they're all being compiled at runtime, with the compiled information cached on the client to reduce the number and size of messages crossing the Internet, Batty said. For instance, a user could link a Yahoo mail server to Amazon's technical publications section to an airline tickets site to create a custom experience. "You get what you want instead of what a Webmaster wants you to see," Batty said.

Curl signed an agreement with CollabNet to serve as the third-party administrator for the open-source code, Batty said, allowing developers to incorporate features they want without having to wait for Curl to build the feature into a future release.

The first release of Curl was for Windows 9x/Me and Windows NT/2000, with Windows XP being tested now. Versions for MacOS X and Linux are expected later this year. Curl supports all major browsers, Batty said. Surge 1.0 is licensed to commercial Web sites and billed on a metered basis; there is no charge for individual users.

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