Curl: Rich Internet Apps get richer

  There's no perfect language for software developers to use for all application needs. But some seem to dominate app/dev thinking for certain projects. So, when it comes to Rich Internet Applications (RIA), it's hard to look beyond the AJAX hype. Yes, AJAX popularized the move to RIA, but it has substantial limits. For one thing, you need to learn when and where to write your business logic in JavaScript and how to use HTML for your presentation layer. And if you want to give your users any offline capabilities, you'd better make certain they only need to use a small amount of data because AJAX can only handle a handful of stored bytes.

Curl, a ten-year-old language developed at MIT specifically for RIA, takes developers beyond AJAX's boundaries. According to Richard Monson-Haefel, vice president of developer relations at Curl Inc., the Cambridge, Mass.-based wholly-owned subsidiary of Sumisho Computer Sciences Corp. in Tokyo, Curl is a single language with a single syntax that handles everything--buttons, Web services calls, business logic--the whole shebang. Bert Halstead, chief architect, adds that with the different language components of AJAX, a major source of an app's complexity "is to decide which part of the application to build in which language." And complexity is further reduced in Curl because you need less code than in AJAX, he says, since you do not have to write additional routines to connect the disparate language dots.

Monson-Haefel contends that RIA developers need to build RIA programs that can run offline as effectively as when they're connected to data sources online. He says Curl can access multiple megabytes of data stored locally, making it possible to give mobile users capabilities previously available only to their deskbound cohorts.

Currently, Curl has runtime environments for Windows, and numerous Linux distributions running Internet Explorer and Firefox. But there's a beta of a version for Apple's OS X and Safari near ready, Halstead says. And, while there's a stand-alone IDE available, Eclipse compatibility is on the company's product roadmap. If RIA is on your roadmap, consider giving Curl a test drive.