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Dev Trends
First Look: The Curl Development Environment
11/8/2007
Going into this review, I was not at all sure what to expect. I had no prior knowledge of Curl, although some preliminary research revealed it to be an object-oriented hybrid markup language with similarities to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The Cambridge, MA-based company behind the Curl language, Curl Inc., describes it as an alternative to AJAX. It allows the programmer to define the structure, style, and function of Web applications in one language instead of several.
Curl is popular in Asia, having been adopted by companies such as Nissan Diesel Motor Co. and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. Curl Inc. itself is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sumisho Computer Systems.
The latest news about Curl is that some of the code has been released to the open source community under the Apache 2.0 license. The Apache 2.0 license differs from the more common General Public License (GPL) used for open source projects by favoring versatility over freedom. Source code licensed under Apache 2.0 may be used for both open source and proprietary closed source projects. In contrast, a project containing GPL code must remain open source under the GPL indefinitely.
Curl Inc. established three open source projects:
- Curl Web Services Development Kit;
- Curl Data Kit supporting client-side SQLite databases; and
- Curl Development Utilities, which includes unit testing and project development tools.
I went to the Curl site and quickly located the Curl integrated development environment (IDE). The IDE is currently available for Windows and Linux, with a Mac OS X version in the works. As a Linux user, I was looking forward to trying Curl on Ubuntu 7.10, but Curl Inc. only offers the Curl IDE in the .rpm package format used by Red Hat, CentOS, SuSE, Fedora and similar Linux distros instead of the .deb packages used by Ubuntu. A representative from Curl, Inc. later informed me that the company does not support the use of the Curl IDE Linux package on Ubuntu. System requirements to run the Curl IDE are described here.
While it is possible to make .rpm packages install on Ubuntu with community-designed conversion tools such as Alien, I was hesitant to employ such a workaround because I wanted a clean install (without additional tools/kludges) to see how well the program performed.
The source code for the Curl IDE was not publicly available at the time of this review, so I couldn't custom-compile it for my system. Therefore, my only recourse was to download and test the Windows version. I booted into Windows XP and acquired the Windows version a few minutes later. Curl is free for personal use, but the personal edition has some enterprise features disabled. Commercial use can be costly, at $12,000 per server on the high end.
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