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Curl : curling the new future of RIA


We now hear the tolling bells of rich internet applications.Market is pacing towards the immense possibilities bred by the new technologies to develop rich applications in desktop.Past was client server computing.Now the door opens to web services and desktop internet applications.We do feel comfortable with desktop applications than internet pages.So the convergence of the possibilites opened by these innovations are harnessed effectively for marketing new products.
The technologies like Ajax, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears Adobe AIR,Microsoft Silverlight are racing in this field.Along comes Dekoh , an indgenous platform from Pramati,India.Another one Curl, web oriented language and platform from Curl Inc popular in Japan.

Curl is taking on Adobe AIR for the rich Internet application (RIA) Web/desktop application development market with a project named Nitro.The Curl Nitro package is delivered in the form of the client run time environement and an IDE for developing the apps with the Curl language. All the components are downloadable and free at here

Nitro provides the essential capabilities of the Fit Client such as support for rich user interfaces, complex application logic, and agile development.Important thing is that it is a platform that supports Curl, Ajax, and Flex applications on-line or off-line, browser based or desktop based.
So this is an all in one solution.Curl is a prominent choice for mission-critical applications that use large data sets and require 3D and 2D rendering, sophisticated data input and visualization.Yep,the applet technolgy is back.

Curl, started off as an research project for MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, under the direction of Professor Steve Ward in 1998.. Curl was purchased by Sumisho Computer Systems of Japan, which migrated the company to Tokyo.

Curl looks like a markup language but is an object-oriented programming language supporting multiple inheritance, strong typing, and just-in-time compilation. Like so many other Web systems, it requires a run-time engine that is downloaded to client computers.Curl has a good formatting functionality which is extendable.It comes with an interface toolkit which makes easy to develop web pages.Recently they came up with a benchmark test results showing that the language is faster than actionscript.Performance test was done as taking a snapshot of a dashboard and displayed in user desktop.Results shows shows that a large image of 2560 x 1920 resolution with 4.92 Mpx is encoded within 2 seconds while Flex took more than 11 seconds.
Therefore Curl can be good soultion for developing interfaces for visualization industry.Let us watch new applications born out of Curl.