Curl is a new web technology. Its home on the internet is
www.curl.com.
This technology has 3 main components.
- The curl content language
- The surge platform
- The Surge Lab IDE
The curl content language: Billed as a multi-faceted ultra-language that can solve every internet-related problem known to man. It is supposed to have markup functionality, scripting functionality as well as be completely object oriented. Like someone took java, HTML and javascript and threw them in a blender. The jury is still out on the validity of these claims. To be completely honest, I haven't made any real attempt to learn this language yet. I'll give it six months and see if it is still around and who has used it and to what effect and then decide if it is worth my time.
The Surge platform: The content-delivery mechanism. From what I saw it is basically a browser plugin that interprets and renders this curl language on the fly. In my opinion, this is the big weakness in the curl technology. People don't like to download plugins. I downloaded it and installed it with no problems or complications. I ran all of the demos. The demos were impressive. The real usefulness of the curl system seems to be in its graphics ability. Images are generated or rendered and raytraced within the browser. this could take some serious pressure off of servers for sites with dynamically generated images, such as graphs, charts
or maps. I did run into a few bugs when running the demos. A few of them I had to try and run 2 or 3 times before they would work.
The Surge Lab IDE: I have not looked at this yet. There is hardly any point in downloading the IDE if I don't know, or intend to know the laguage any time soon. The site claims that the IDE is composed of a source editor, debugger, something called an "inspector", a console for system-level messages, a developers guide as well as some new functionality for viewing the applications directly from the editor. Sounds like your average IDE to me.
From what I have seen, curl seems to be a valid technology with with decent potential. However, the whole thing smells like java to me. Even on the curl website they call the curl applications "applets".
If anything pushes this technology forward, it will probably be the seemingly impressive graphics system. I never was overly impressed with java's graphics packages.
If anything kills this technology it will probably be the fact that you have to install a plugin. If they could get some built-in support from the browsers (yeah right) that might help a lot.
All in all, I think curl is neat. But I'm not sure how useful it is. Without a decent development community and some really useful applications, it will be hard to get anyone to put any eggs in the curl basket.
We'll see.