Ajax Disappoints Power Users

A recent Forrester research paper by Stefan Ried examines how new RIA Ajax based applications are being accepted in the business community.

Stefan notes that "a great user experience is one of the most compelling and important characteristics of a modern business application." As Ajax based business applications are becoming more common his research shows that their interfaces tend to frustrate powers users. Power users are used to high performance extremely interactive client-server applications and are easily frustrated by Ajax based applications.

Stefan details a list of Ajax's shortcomings as a platform for enterprise business applications. These include slow performance, inability to deal with large complex displays and inconsistency between browser platforms.

To all you Ajax folks who have experienced these shortcomings first hand, you should check out Curl! Curl offers the high performance of client-server applications, easily handles complex displays with large datasets and runs on Windows, Linux , Mac. It's easy to Get Started Now.


From the Desk

Richard Treadway

Curl Releases Web Services Developer Kit

On Tuesday we will announce the release of the Curl Web Services Development Kit - WSDK. Yesterday I briefed Paul Krill of InfoWorld on the announcement and he wrote this article.

This announcement is significant to Curl for a couple of reasons.

• This is our first Open Source product. - Back in October of last year we contributed 3 components to Open Source. This was the first step in our open source strategy. We will continue to contribute key components of the product that help support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs to Open Source . Now we have completed the integration and testing of the Curl WSDK and will offer it as a fully supported component of our RIA Platform.
  
  
• The WSDK links Curl RIA applications directly to SOA - As enterprises continue to execute on their SOA strategy they are increasingly seeing the need to present and visualize large complex data sets on the client. Untill recently complex business processing and data manipulation has been a server side task. Now with RIAs more processing can happen on the client enabling much more responsive and dynamic applications. The WSDK provides the functions to enable direct connection to SOA back-end data.
  

The WSDK provides a simple way to use web services directly in Curl applications. You are can obtain information resources from a Service Oriented Architecture though SOAP and WSDL, or from a Resource Oriented Architecture though REST and XML.

SOAP Web Services described using WSDL are processed by the WSDK and converted directly into Curl packages and class definitions, which can be used just like any other Curl application component. The service definitions can be processed programmatically, or using a tool in the Curl IDE.

Additionally the WSDK XML Document Model (XDM) provides functionality for processing XML data in Curl: reading, creating, modifying and writing XML documents. XML document contents are represented as a hierarchy of Curl objects. The objects can be accessed using methods and by XPath expressions. They can be displayed, transformed into other Curl representations, and used as a basis for data binding.

In traditional Web environments, Web services and resources are usually consumed by other Web servers. The full potential of web data can be realized using Curl’s rich client environment. Curl clients can directly consume Web services since the Web service technology stack is embedded in the runtime platform. This allows for dynamic presentation and direct interaction with the information resources.


From the Desk

Richard Treadway