Andrew Powell's Flex, Java, ColdFusion, and AJAX Blog

Jun 13Curl: First Impressions

A few days ago I was on a call with some sales people from Curl who were pitching us on their platform. I've sat on this a while because I wanted a chance to fully look into it and give it a fair shake. Having said and done that, I can say that I am not impressed.

One of the first points that the sales person made was something to the effect of "We're huge in Japan." That's all well and good, but the RIA market is much more than Japan. They claim to have been enabling RIA development since 1998. Not quite as long as Flash, but still not a new kid on the block either. OK, so far not too bad... Then someone stuck their foot in their mouth: The one thing that the sales person did that really pissed me off was basing their pitch on disparaging other technologies (Sliverlight and Flex). They claimed that Silverlight was "too late to the RIA party." Hello? Pot meet kettle? You may be big in Japan, but when it comes to mindshare amongst RIA developers, you're just as late, if not later than Microsoft to this party. At one point I had to stop these fellows and ask them to focus the discussion on what they can do, not what others can't do. Let's just say this isn't the best way to introduce me to your platform.

Seeing as this was going nowhere fast, I decided to look into it a bit more myself. Well, it turns out that to develop in Curl you need to learn yet another language. It looks a little like VB, a little like Java, but not totally. It's OO like AS3, but it's also got some elements to it that AS3 doesn't have yet (native 3D). This could be good or bad, take it for what it's worth.

If you want to get to remote data, you're pretty limited to web services or straight up XML. One of the not-so-hidden secrets to Flex's success is the binary remoting you get from AMF. This has really been a home run from the get go and we, as Flex developers, often overlook how valuable this can be in developing RIA apps. The lack of any kind of binary transfer is a major turn off, at least for me. Web services are bloated at best and useless at worst. If they want to improve this, the need to look at implementing AMF (open spec) or Hessian for some time of binary remoting.

I really think that the guys at Curl probbly mean well and have put a lot of good time and effort into their product. I just can't get myself over the image I have in my head of it being a scrappy MIT project that someone threw some VC at and tried to make it viable as a product. Really and truly, they are fighting an uphill battle against Adobe and Microsoft (same could have been said for a little company called Allaire a decade ago) with not much hope of breaking through the "big two" of RIA development. It's a good effort at an RIA platform, but in my opinion, not much more. Don't just take my word for it though: go to their site, take a look yourself, and form your own opinion.

Comments

I had never even heard of them until maybe 6 months ago.

Ben Clinkinbeard
06/13/08 12:06 PM

I have yet to see a Curl application that is anywhere near as aesthetically pleasing as what Flex is capable of. Everything that I have seen to-date looks like an old thick-client app that was written in the 90s... Did they show you anything that actually looked good?

Andrew Trice
06/13/08 12:31 PM

@Andrew nothing that had what I'd call the "wow factor"

Andrew Powell
06/13/08 12:45 PM

@Andrew,

Thanks for the blog post and the pointer to Curl. I plan to share your feedback with our sales team.

It's true that there are more flex applications that tickle the design funny bone. We are working on that, but to be honest most of our deployments (over 300 enterprise deployments) are focused on security and performance rather than beauty. Curl can produce very aesthetic interface - on par with Flex - but we haven't shown that side of it.

With regard to remoting. We are actually in the process of implementing AMF ourselves. It's a good binary protocol (Hates off to Adobe) and we plan to support it along with our other remote protocols JSON, SOAP, REST, and plain XML over HTTP.

All the best,

Richard Monson-Haefel
VP of Developer Relations
Curl, Inc.

Richard Monson-Haefel
06/13/08 5:00 PM

Hates off to Adobe? Thats one hell of a Freudian slip LOL

Ben Clinkinbeard
06/13/08 10:22 PM

Dear RIA/SOA Fellows !

I have stumbled upon CURL years ago; but never tried it out more thoroughly because their
licensing policy - and missing comprehensive support for data transfer - has shied me away ...

Now what I am really after is the following: Can somebody please tell me what the
recommended way is to transfer data from a server to a client over the wire ?
Is it
- JSON via REST ?
- Or anything via AMF ?
- Or is the answer - as so often these days -: It depends :-) ?


Kai Tischler from Northrhine-Westfalia in Germany

Kai Tischler
06/18/08 11:22 AM