Curl’s Client/Web architecture promises to deliver enterprise-level applications that reclaim the desktop power of client/server, while leveraging the deployment efficiencies of the Web. The product uses a new language, also called Curl, which has a rich technical history dating back to a $5 million Darpa-MIT research project begun in 1995. Twelve individuals, including Tim Berners-Lee, originator of the first Web browser, founded Curl in 1998. The first product resulting from the research was released in 2001; after tailoring and packaging for use by enterprise developers, the product is being released now as the 2.0 version, dubbed Curl Client/Web Platform.
The product includes a runtime engine and an integrated development environment with a Visual Basic-like graphical user interface (GUI) editor and an extensible programming language. Curl applications integrate with Java and .Net-based back-end systems. In a Curl application, an initial request from a user results in the back-end server sending down an application and its associated data in a compact file that may be half the size of the HTML page. From that point, the application executes on the client platform. It requests additional data as needed, and the application continues to work if the user is disconnected from the network. The application architecture requires less server power and network bandwidth.
The product aims to attach a problem the company defines as the limitation of the current Web infrastructure, which concentrates almost all computing power on the server. This results in slow application performance and limited functionality. The Curl hybrid approach is to build a "smart UI" and more sharing of code between client and mid-tier application servers.
"We’re selling software to anybody building enterprise portals or utilizing Web services," says John Capobianco, executive vice president with Curl, which has agreements with 18 system integrator partners to build applications for their customers using Curl’s tools. Functions that applications built with Curl exhibit include graphing, page layout and resizing, smart tables, animation, interactive UI scripting, 2-D and 3-D graphics and secure data file management.
The product platform includes the Surge Runtime Environment and the Surge Lab Integrated Development Environment. The runtimed environment is a client application framework that includes components that support multimedia, a GUI system, security and connectivity. The development tools include a visual layout editor, debugger, an object inspector, a context-sensitive source editor, project management tools and a deployment wizard.
The Curl language was build from the ground up to support rich text formatting and layout, fast and easy scripting, full object-oriented programming, flexible UI libraries and reduced boilerplate code, yielding a smaller code size.
A Curl starter kit costs $25,000; the average customer pays approximately $200,000 to become fully outfitted, the company says.
Curl came about as an improvement on HTML, according to David Goldberg, senior systems engineer who helped develop Curl. "HTML has come to be thought of as a description of something visual,"' he says. "But we looked at it as a programming language without much capability. The idea of combining programming and presentation in one package was a way to easily develop and maintain applications. We felt the server should gather data and do what processing was needed to perform functions, and the UI should handle the presentation."
The model is being validated to a degree by products such as Flash from Macromedia, which exploits clients for more presentation processing, but Curl is an industrial strength development tool supporting security and just-in-time compilation among its features, Goldberg says.
www.curl.com
