The Other RIA Desktop Platform: Curl Nitro
Curl is another player in the RIA (Rich Internet Applications) space, going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe's Flex platform, and OpenLazlo, among others. The Curl platform provides developers a way to build web-based apps that can't be easily built using Ajax or other web-based technologies. Those apps can be deployed both within the web browser or on the desktop via Curl Nitro, an extension of the Curl platform. To show off what Nitro can do, the company has recently released a demo app featuring a visual representation of the Facebook social graph.
The Curl Platform and Curl Nitro
Where the Curl platform itself competes with Flex and Silverlight, Curl Nitro competes more directly with Adobe AIR, Mozilla Prism, Google Gears, and other applications that allow content from the web to run on the desktop while also providing asynchronous communication with various back-end services.
This recently released Nitro demo app called CurlGraph was designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com (our coverage) and it allows you to visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from your Facebook account. By examining the ring of friends and the arcs that indicate the relationships between them, you can visualize what your personal social graph looks like.
Of course, in order to run the app, you'll need to have Curl Nitrol Beta RTE already installed. You can then download the app, CurlGraph, from here and the code from here (note: zip file).
When installing the app, the dialog box looks very familiar - much like Adobe AIR - and the process was just as easy. You login to Facebook via the app and then it will graph out all of your Facebook friend connections.
Fighting For the Desktop
While the app itself is an impressive way to showcase Curl's ability to support a visually engaging desktop application, the company itself is going to be up against some tough competition to gain a foothold on the desktop.
At the moment there's the popularity of Adobe AIR's desktop widgets to deal with, especially among early adopters and other enthusiasts, not to mention Silverlight and other players in the RIA game, including OpenLaszlo, NexaWeb Enterprise 2.0, Dojo, Altio Live, UltraLightClient and JavaFX.
Curl's best bet may be with their enterprise efforts or with their open source web services development kit (WSDK), shipped earlier this year as a part of the Curl Rich Internet Application Platform 6.0. But even then, they're up against Microsoft's Silverlight offering which was ported to Linux by some Novell developers as Moonlight.
Fighting big companies like Microsoft and Adobe isn't easy for a smaller shop, nor is competing against JavaFX and others in the enterprise. Yet that doesn't mean that Curl isn't trying. Curl's VP of Developer Relations, Richard Monson-Haefel, left a comment here on RWW not long ago which was very critical of Adobe AIR's security model, a subject recently noted by Adobe platform evangelist Ryan Stewart on his blog.
Stewart references a recent presentation by Ethan Malasky called Developing Secure AIR Applications, and then says that "security is one of the things that gets talked a lot about with regards to AIR and the team spent a huge, huge amount of time thinking about the security mode." (Slides from the presentation are below).
If the Curl platform is truly more secure, then they may be able to find success in the enterprise space, an area which AIR and Silverlight are both trying to reach now. However, Curl will have to be up for the battle because those two companies have a lot more resources to fight aggressively for RIA marketshare.
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The comments made a while back by me, the Curl VP of Developer Relations are regrettable. At the time we were very negative on our competitors, but since then we have cleaned up our act.
Curl does have a great security story, but it was in bad taste picking on Adobe AIR. Consumers should look at the security models in both platforms and make their own decisions.
Personally, I really like Flex and AIR and the folks that work at adobe are nothing if not gracious. About a week ago I apologized to Adobe for the trash talk. (here is the post retracting those type of statements http://theclevermonkey.blogspot.com/2008/06/fair-play-in-love-and-war.html ) We (Adobe and Curl) are getting along very well.
In fact, we recommend Adobe Flex and AIR as a great alternative to Curl. Curl is really more focused on the Enterprise and not mass consumer applications. If you want to appeal to the mass consumer Adobe may be a better choice. When it comes to the enterprise we believe that Curl is better. In the end however the market will decide.
Peace,
Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.
JavaFX is cool. I am exploring JavaFX for my next application development which requires heavy 2D interactive plottings (on the fly).
In the case of MS Enterprise right now you also got WPF/.net 3.5 apps doing rounds in the enterprise where WPF/.NET apps are way bigger and more abundant than in the consumer market. lets remember that those are the same apps powering things like Surface, Windows 7 multitouch support tests and special enterprise apps that work with Sharepoint among many other custom solutions to yet fully unveiled MS enterprise tech.
In the case of Linux and Mac Consumer Desktop. Silverlight powered Desklets already exist on both. on the case of Windows that will be cleared out by the fall or even earlier if certain Microsoft roadmap schedule don`t changes. so by the end of this year you will have to count silverlight as a competitor for the desktop in the same way we now do count AIR, Google Gears enabled web apps and JavaFX.
Then if you also look at the mobile sector you got a update to .net looming on the horizon and the release of Silverlight Mobile this summer where AIR, Flex, GGears and Prism equivalents don`t exist yet and JavaFX is running late compared to Silverlight development.
i think that in real terms Curl is only against to JavaFX, Google and maybe Mozilla in the same way the other 5 minor competitors in the RIA market have been doing all this year up to now.
Aha. just checked out the Features chart from Curl. love how they somehow are superior to the very latest in .Net 3.5 (and hence .net framework extensions and use of WPF with .Net 3.5)
minus the "platform indepedent" thing. that is of course totally true.
REBOL http://www.rebol.com
It's worth checking out for quick, easy, cross-platform RIA in a super-small footprint (around 500kb).
Well... very nice to know anoter RIA environment... We are doing some tests with Adobe's and also Microsoft's... but always is a big job to work with a new env... tests everything... but, we have to what ever it takes.