An eclectic-pencil blog » Curl

Curl International to merge with Sumisho

Administrator — Sun, 02 May 2010 12:40:44 +0000

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International, their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by this merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment – either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.

iPad and eBook app’s

Administrator — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:59:03 +0000

I posted a note over at aule-browser in response to David Frum on the iPad.

Poetry annotations browser

Administrator — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:15:09 +0000

For the coming International Day of Poetry, I have a “guess that poet” up at the aule-browser blog.

Curl RTE and processing.org

Administrator — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:55:51 +0000

I was visiting a Curl 2-D demo page when I noticed a minor over-sight and a minor worry: the page appears not to mention that to run the demos you should click on either of the two images: one of “smoke rings” and one which creates a pattern of pseudoantherium. The minor worry was about which browsers to use for the demo, so I took a moment and tried a few from my XP desktop. No problems with my handful of current up-to-date browsers.

The intent of the demo’s was to show the ease with which the same results could be obtained in Curl as in another language from MIT: Processing.

Given the hype around Flash Catalyst these demo’s seemed worth a visit.

Web Velocity released

Administrator — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:27:06 +0000

I have a note over at my Curl blog that Web Velocity is now available. So “Borges” for Ruby should look out even if running on rubinious …

Actually, CINCOM’s framework will likely see adoption in the enterprise (in recent years, financials) and Ruby on Rails remain the small ISV temptation that it already is … and no, Smalltalk is not dead: just look at the CINCOM client list.

Nor is PROLOG dead. One of the vendors simply chooses to mention their software and their clients, not their language. Competitive advantage, I suppose. What Seaside has done for Smalltalk we may yet see Logtalk do for PROLOG.

As for Curl, there should be an announcement soon …

Aule Browser

Administrator — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:51:24 +0000

Over at my LogiqueWerks pages there is now a demo of the Aule Browser to view online or run on desktop for Windows or linux. You must first install the Curl runtime engine – something both safe and easy (Curl came out of MIT at the same time as the w3.org and has been in use in large corporations in Japan for almost a decade.)

‘Aule’ means hall or entryway (it is ‘Eule’ that mean owl … ) and because of the ‘lobby’ concept in the Io language, I had once suggested it as a name for Io. “Simple” was taken, so ‘Aule’ it is!

Simple Browser and Clean Browser

Administrator — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:25:41 +0000

I took a moment to look at my Process Explorer (MS SysInternals) after starting up Google’s GMail Desktop applet. The price? Three processes consuming about 60 MB of available memory (this is Windows, so we are talking “available” and not my paltry 2 GB of RAM.) And when I open my gmail inside my LW site-specific Curl embedded browser? I have only added 1.2 MB to the load carried by the Curl RTE. Of course Internet Explorer and FireFox do help my harddrives stay in shape with all that swapping …. or do those folks think that all we do is browse the net with no real work applications open at the same time? Oh right .. those applications are going to be built into the internet browser …

So why the difference? The plugins and the bookmarks. I have a bookmarks set which exports as 5 Mb. It is too much for Maxthon to load. It is deadly when I ask even IE8 to first add a bookmark (go make coffee or tea or take a stroll.)

But Curl can load dynamically, so watch for the bookmarking addition to our Curl embedded browsers over at LogiqueWerks.

HTTP resync issues for Curl applets

Administrator — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:13:44 +0000

With the release of Curl 7.0 there is now an additional resync facility as noted by Chris Barber.

Here is what the documentation says:

resync-file (accessor) Class: ComponentMetaData Package: CURL.LANGUAGE.COMPONENT

getter public sealed resync-file:#String
setter public sealed resync-file:#String

Set component resynchronization time from specified file.

When specified in the meta-data for an applet or script this attribute defines the URL of a file whose when-last-modified time will be used to set the value of process-resync-as-of.

When setting this value through this setter, the value must contain an absolute URL or an exception will be thrown. When setting via the applet or script declaration a relative path may be used or the empty string may be used as shorthand for the main applet or script load file.