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New Language CURL Merges HTML And Javascript
jluxe writes: "CNN reports that a new language, Curl, was presented at the Software Development Forum in Palo Alto. This language works via a plug-in to browsers, and attempts to merge the gap between HTML, javascript, java, and even C++. It also supports the Macromedia Flash plug-in. Interesting to note that Tim Berners-Lee is listed as a financial backer of this venture, as well as an adviser." Here's the Curl Corporation's official website as well.
... they demonstrate how easy it is to launch pop-up ad windows with no "Close" button in curl...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
The thing about hate about Slashdot is the hypocrisy. When you submit a comment it says something like, "Don't like what you submitted? You should have hit the Preview button." Then they act as if everything's peachy when they post the same news story twice. And not just once in awhile. This has been happening a lot lately. Duh, use a "preview button", Malda et al.
that, sir, is a badass article =]
I dunno, I've seen browsers grow exponentially in bloat and instability trying to support all the client-side technologies (Java, JavaScript, DHTML, Flash, ActiveX..) over the years. And in the end, web pages that do most stuff server-side and just pass along HTML with a little bit of javascript mouseovers usually provide the most pleasant end-user experience.
Do we really need more client-side bloat? By pushing the task of compiling code onto the client, you take a task that can be done quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly by the server and move it to a thousand clients, all of which are likely to screw up, and none of which can boast the computational power of the server.
I just smell another new buzzword to make me upgrade my browser, make web pages not work right, make my browser eat more RAM, and make whatever company invented the technology money as the browsers scramble to license the technology.
On top of all of this the real kicker is the amount of testing and release engineering you have to do on each platform before shipping it. Believe me you have to do this. Defects are a way of life with real products.
About this language, I'm sceptical of a new replacement for everything. Second, who uses Java on the client-side anyway ? The beauty of Java is that server-side stuff is cross-platform. Java on the client is just another language. I think we're doing just well for various approaches to separate content and logic.
Finally we've put in a whole load of internet infrastructure for dynamic caching. Separating content from logic will also allow us to be even more aggressive with caching fragments of web pages all over the 'net. I'm not sure how a proprietary solution will work ..
IMO these guys are probably angling to be bought by Microsoft.
"Well, we're a commerical venture and we've gone about registering this trademark, your honor..."
fucking eh.. big ups to that point dude..
---
I have no more mana so I am gonna waste bandwidth.
Go back a few years in the archives and load up a few stories where someone (deliberately or not) has a non-breaking word in a post that makes it unwrappable.
Once the various lamers discovered this, they started using it to make reading the comments a living hell, since the resulting page would be unbelievably wide.
can't get anything to work ... pretty www.glitchfull.com
Everybody's saying that my shit don't suck
Oooh Magoo Kuk Kuk, Magoo Kuk Kuk
Woke up in the morning in my pickup truck
Magoo Kuk Kuk, Magoo Kuk Kuk.
Yeah, it's a feeling right now
Yeah, gonna shine my light now
Yeah, a little bastard fight now
Oooh, Magoo Kuk Kuk, Magoo Kuk Kuk.
That is all for now. Wash your nuts four times, and look both ways before you cross the sidewalk!
Don't twitch the gidgets, and use that Preview Button!
No no - it doesn't merge the languages or technologies - it is a completely new language / runtime that incorporates many aspects of the different languages / runtimes.
That's how it always is.
Fight what?
:)
According to their page, they're working on a Linux (and a Mac) version. Like it or not, Windows is by far the most widely-used OS, it makes sense to target it first. Give it a little time, perhaps even email them politely to ask when they expect it to be ready. If, after a reasonable amount of time, they still haven't made good on their promise, then you can get shirty with them. (Although asking nicely what the delay is first would be good...)
Forgive me if I'm under-reacting, but this is the first I've heard of CURL, so I've been "waiting" for a Linux version for about 30 minutes
I stand by my original comment though - nothing is guaranteed to turn people against your cause more than unjustified attacks.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"Because I'm a VA board member, under SEC regulations there's a six-month lockout on the shares (a regulation designed to keep people from floating bogus offerings, cashing out, and skipping to Argentina before the share price crashes). So it's not strictly true that I'm wealthy right now. I will be wealthy in six months, unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I'll bet on VA; I'm not so sure about the U.S. economy :-)."
CURL is heavily influenced by Lisp, a language popular among Computer Scientists. A relatively simple dialect of Lisp, Scheme, is used in teaching introductory CS. Improvements from Perl 4 to Perl 5 were inspired by Scheme, as were some current and future Python features. Scheme's syntax is quite different from C, etc., albeit simpler and more uniform.
Kawa Scheme compiles directly to JVM bytecodes, without any intermediate Java-language code. It's quite useful for scripting in a Java environment. I've extended it into the Beautiful Report Language (BRL), a template system like PHP but without the language misfeatures. If you want to get a feel for a Lisp-like language while working in a server-side Java environment, BRL would be a good tool.
In case you missed it, yes, this is a shameless plug. I wrote BRL and use it daily in a professional environment.
fucking in the butt.. fucking in the butt.. fucking in the butt.. I'd like to fuck the shit out of you I'd like to fuck the shit out of you I'd like to fuck the shit out of you I'd like to fuck the shit out of you [upbeat solo] Please put my gland in your hand Hey please put my gland in your hand Oh please put my gland in your hand Please put my gland in your hand [solo] Baby won't you give me some head Hey baby won't you give me some head Hey baby won't you give me some head Baby won't you give me some head [solo] We like to eat lunch down at the Y We like to eat lunch down at the Y We like to eat lunch down at the Y -- Why? Because we love you Hi, I'm David, and these are my friends. We've enjoyed doing this album for you. We'd like to especially dedicate this album to all the members of the Mickey Mouse fanclub and also to you Ms. Kalabash, wherever you are. And I'd like to Fuck the shit out of you I'd like to fuck the shit out of you I'd like to fuck the shit out of you Fucking in the butt.. Fucking in the butt.. Fucking in the butt..
What the fsck is wrong with HTML for documentation?
:wq
Yet still, people write shopping carts that calculate totals and shipping charges in javascript, then trust the client to send back accurate data.
That's poor implementation by the developer. Shopping carts should be implemented on the server side.
I very rarely agree with the NRA, but guns don't kill people, people kill people.
The best technology doesn't always win. Ogg Vorbis is technically better than MP3, but hardly anyone uses it. HTML/Javascript are very well known and common. It will take people a long time to get to the same proficency with Curl, if ever.
Is this a free format, or is it covered by patents?
Curl is several years old. It was picking up a little momentum as a freely available language/browser (source available) hosted from an MIT page (http://curl.lcs.mit.edu/curl/). It was an academic project with a grant from DARPA. IIRC, the academic page simply disappeared one day (maybe I've just been unlucky every time I try to access it; it's cached on google).
A year or so later, the commercial page showed up with mounds of reeking lawyer-speak.
The idea is pretty good, but it had a hard time taking off when it was free. Maybe it would make sense for someone to do a similar Lisp/TeX cross, but their attitude toward how to promote it is so ridiculously wrong that it's obviously not going anywhere in its current form.
Don't you just love it when government-funded academic research gets fenced off by a clueless corporation?
---
You'd be surprised at the broadband connection available to things crawling around in your hair.
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.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Network traffic, database connections, and server load would then be reduced. I can then have fewer servers and pay less in hosting - both cash decisions.
More importantly, they say "short development cycles". If my developers can pump out more code and become more productive ... then they're value is increased and so is my end product. Both serious financial considerations.
No, there aren't any such issues.
The names curl and libcurl have been used by our project (curl.haxx.se) for more than three years now, which should make any claims on trademark infringements look silly.
The last time this "news" was brought up here on slashdot, one of the curl.com employees even said he was sorry about this name clash but that they were too far in the process to turn around, when they discovered our projected was already present and named identically.
stop with the making of new crap! All i want to see is making what we have now work right on all platforms and the way it's supposed to.
Besides, IE and Netscape don't even support HTML or JavaScript completely in every way, in exactly the same way.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
William H Gates III is a manager at a Redmond, WA company that acquired the rights to Quick&Dirty Operating System to resell to IBM. He has since devoted his time to vaccinating children from the Third World, with the support of his wife Melissa, who is ironically named after a computer virus.
George Herbert Walker Bush is a member of the US aristocracy, currently the Duke of Washington; his father was the Earl of Texas and his brother Jed is the current Marquis of Florida. In the United Kingdom by contrast heriditary peers have recently lost their voting rights.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a religious figure based in Kyoto, where he is sent letters of devotion from his followers.
Karol Wojtyla is a Polish guy who moved to Italy for the better weather and an ISO-8859-1 compatible character set, where he likes to speak to people in the local piazza.
I'll warn you that the www.php.net documentation (the only place that can stay up-to-date on the language) is seriously lacking in info for many of its functions. It's a young language but if someone has taken the time to get a function working and integrated into php surely that person can be asked to describe what it does!
Zend, php's "mother" company, has closed source php's engine and (worse :) has seriously annoyed me (wasted a month of my time by not admitting bugs they knew they had). I'd put them several rungs below Microsoft in trustworthiness.
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
If this was to get embraced as a free standard I would be a glad to learn the technology and impliment it in a few years when browsers supported it on the client side, but I doubt that will happen. These guys are out to make a buck and it is another damn plugin that has to be in a web browser.
We can not go forward in this medium if we continue to do things like this. Most of the time the technology that works for a medium is not necisarily the best technology out there. For example, there are beter video codecs then MPEG 2, but we have decided that the DVD medium will stick to MPEG 2. It would be retarded if I had to update DVD players (or buy new ones) to play different disks. The WWW medium is going to progress a LOT faster if we can stick with marukup languages, programing languages, scripting languages, and media codecs that everyone can read play and develop for. We can always develop with newer cooler tools, however clients DO NOT want to download new browsers download new media players, and install new plugins. This is a fact (with the exception of us geeks).
I am f'n sick of this "We can do it better" bull. The only reason things like DVD players, CD players, Microwaves, TVs, Radios, keyboards, cars, etc work so well is because we have decided to adopt certain standards for at least a decade.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Too bad Microsoft didn't come up with this first.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
Hmmm look at the bandwidth available even using GPRS and I'd say the bandwith/client processing power still stands. Even your mobile phone will be able to process and manipule data client side and will probably give a better client experience if it does rather than having to do page refreshes every time something minimal changes on the page. The PC will be with us for a long time yet...it'll get smaller, you may wear it instead of sitting in front of it, but No-one is going to want to use a spreadsheet which has to submit back to the server to do a formula calculation in a cell. In fact the ONLY web based office suites I've seen which work are either Java based, or in the case of the brainbox spreadsheet (www.brainbox.com) Use javascript EXTENSIVELY. You only have to look at the rise in P2P style applications to see that distributed computing power, it taking off. I'd say the era of the 'HTML web browser' should be coming to a close. I want an application browser which downloads application elements rather than an HTML based interface that's just a jumped way of displaying static information. I'd say you wont be using a TV to watch streamed video anymore - you'll watch TV on your PC.
K.
K
Even better, learn Engrish!!!
The Berners-Lee connection will only serve to sucker venture capitalists.
If Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley came out with an exciting new expansion card bus specification, would we automatically listen to them? Why not, I mean, c'mon, they invented the transistor, right? Who better to design modern computer hardware? Right?
Sheesh.
I don't WANT pages more complex than what you can get out of PHP anyway...
But that would require acknowledging that another whole day has gone by without some adrenalin-boosting new thing to obsess over... timothy's heart couldn't handle the pressure drop!
You've got to be smoking something particularly potent to think this is GOOD news.
sulli
RTFJ.
You are right on the general server side aspect of PHP but compared to some of its rivals, PHP pales.
Consider Zope. Built in Python, it starts from the ground up as a general purpose language (php for gui apps? Pah). Coupled with a built in persistant object database and 2 standard tempalate systems - both of which are a dream to use compared to FastTemplate, they are not comparable. And how does having Free Undo on all your content object sound?
And its free, all of it. www.zope.org
uh, javascript isnt just a clientside language. and it certainly wasnt a bad idea. its a pretty sweet language.
....................
(python.org)
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Let's see... We humans started using computers because we were locked away for a while by nature, and the the north pole / sahara are mindbogginly dull because they don't have computers (let alone net access) there?
/var/run/twitter.sock is a twitter socket puppet.
One simple way to foil this would be to only pay for each unique IP that the advert was served to- I'm pretty sure they implement something simple like this.
I dunno about that but I'd prefer scheme to Javascript any old day. Webscheme anyone?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Well, for a nice system that does this, go to enhydra.org. The content is in XML, and presentation/logic in Java. Other XML-based systems are examples of this as well. There are also a number of non-XML "template processors" that are widely used.
Let me know when their using their product. Then I'll take the time to study it.
I saw the Siemens company name on the page and a saying popped up from my curly brain plugin: "Do you want something useful or Siemens?"
---Siemens: Over 1 Billion censored.
> It also supports the Macromedia Flash plug-in.
OK, so someone made a language that will make your browser do all the things you ever didn't want it to do. $SUBJECT
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
You won't be browsing the web (at home) from a PC - it will be a TV...
Not if I can help it. If web was all I did on my computer at home, perhaps, but it's not.
Thanks!
grep -ri 'should work'
At least here you only pay when it is commercial - and then it's apparently a ridiculously small amount - they're basing their revenue model off of volume, so charge basically nothing to lots of people.
There's no charge until something is commercially deployed. And then the charge is proportional to how much it's actually used.
"The Man" likes this because he's already paying per use: server usage, pipes, etc. If he can pay less per use -- sending some of the difference to Curl -- that's cool, too.
Even so, there are other plans such as volume discounts for the big, or first X gigs free for the small. I'd rather see Curl post all this on the site, but I suppose requiring direct personal communication at this stage cuts down on people misquoting or making stuff up.
It is true that with or without Curl technology, you can hit reload a zillion times and cost some corporation an extra nickel or two. One change with Curl is that the additional cost might be less.
Logging of usage information includes nothing that isn't in server logs. Actually, it's less: no identifying personal information at all, such as machine ID. In general, nothing about the user is "licensed" in any way, only the content provider.
There's no charge for development or end user seats. (OK, so the Beta development environment is about what you'd expect from people who use Linux in development. Yes, we run our stuff on Linux internally, but commercial quality will take more work. Anyway, the point is that we don't charge for the IDE, compiler or runtime.)
The legal mumbo-jumbo on the site serves some of the same purpose as the Free Software Foundation's protection of GNU stuff -- to make it (at least a little) harder for bad guys to take control of the technology and restrict it in a less nice way.
Achieving critical mass for plug-in deployment and content creation is hard, but there are other more channelled ways to go. The pricing should "keep out of the way" of both.
I give a lot of credit to DARPA and investors for supporting what I feel is pretty progressive approach. Of course, no one knows how nice it will turn out for everybody. But I'd like to think it's starting off as practical and reasonable. I'm sure someone will tell me where I'm thinking wrongly about this...
Howard Stearns - I work at Curl Corporation, but I speak for myself.
This caught my eye:
Second, by harnessing the vast power of client-side computing. We take advantage of that 90 percent or more of a typical computer user's CPU that's just sitting there idle, itching to get into the Internet game.
I thought Java was a headache when it came to slowing down my CPU and crashing my Windoze; I can't wait to avoid this one.
For similar reasons, we should reduce the number of words in the English language. That would be double-plus good.
Yep, Its true using JavaScript for validation has definite flaws.
/Application/ not just a website the overall effect of carefully used JavaScript is beneficial. Yes you can just throw more hardware at the problem but with a properly designed and documented system implementing the validation is the last and easy step to the entire process.
/. crowrd are tough to sell on js from all the popups and just turn it off. People fight it tooth and nail some of the time. Oh well.. client side scripting has its uses and the sooner people realize that the easier it gets. No its not anything special and no I still don't trust the client data EVER without server side validation. For the effort it takes to write the JS in most cases it far outweighs not having it. But your right, most people dont design nor document. But when that question has come up I could prove that the time invested gave enough benefits and return on the time invested that it was very much worth it. Of course im blessed to have co-workers and developers that understand the wonders of actually designing something :)
No it is not the greatest
Yes it takes more time to develop and maintain two totally seperate languages for data validation.
I have sat down and thought about it quite a bit and had quite a few technical reviews over it.
The overall consensus is that for an
Of course there have been situations where I nixed JavaScript of any sort (highly used websites that handled a good bit of e-commerce). Its different and of course one off the wall comment of mine doesnt solve or prove anything. It requires a well designed and analyzed development plan with a competent development team to effectively utilize when to use a technology and when to not use a technology. To offhand say, "You cant possibly do that for nearly the same cost" is of course asinine as you noted. Documentation and Design are wonderful things. I can pass my design document off to the HTML/UI guys and the validation takes them at most an hour client side to implement properly. Same goes to the backend/middleware people.
In most situations the JS is not required but is there if the user can utilize it. For an intranet oh well if you don't like it. JavaScript has DEFINITE advantages in terms of user interface design. I know a lot of people especially the
We are in the business of writing software and are don't even think of it in terms of a website anymore. The difference in culture and development methodology is striking compared to a typical web development shop.
Jeremy
That may satisfy the HR-tards with requirements for "5 years as a Curl or C developer"
As someone who knows many of the people involved in CurlCo, I can assure you that the hidden business plan was to be bought out by Microsoft which, at the time of CurlCo's incorporation, was thought to need something to compete with Java.
Your post indicates that you have a pretty limited view of the programming language space. PHP is "Perl and C/C++ wrapped into one" because it has "classes", "great string manipulation", "support for CGI" and "now GTK" These are all supported by Python, Perl, Ruby and a host of other languages. PHP is just one among many. PHP's real virtue is that it is totally embedded in the web server environment. It is hard to justify it purely in terms of language features as you seem to want to. It is a mediocre language embedded in a great dynamic web pages environment.
And anyhow, the existence of these many server side languages do not really have any impact on the need for languages on the client side. Yes, PHP can generate JavaScript, HTML, Flash and other stuff that works on the client-side. But really Curl is competing with those client-side languages, not with PHP. PHP could just as easily generate Curl if it turned out to be better than JavaScript et. al. So PHP is great at what it does but not really relevant to the question of Curl's utility or viability.
If they think bandwidth is a problem, then the best solution is to kill all the graphic designers who make web pages just like they used to make paper brochures before they took the Dreamweaver for Dummies course.
Sorry guys, but the stuff I work on (financial calculators - yeah, it is dull) needs to have at least predictable performance. I'd never do it client-side - hand crafted C++ on the server, sending simple HTML is the One True Way.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
I really hate Niggers. I hate 'em. Yep.
From their site: We charge commercial customers based on the volume of Curl content executed. This is a non-starter.
http://curl.haxx.se/
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Why don't I just put up a page of C++ source and tell people to "lynx -source http://code_url|gcc"?
:)
Sure, whatever...
And get haunted late at night because of all the guilt you have for letting people see all the compiler errors for not piping it to g++ ?
Sure, why not...
-
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
Umm. lets see. I load an third party control, then I learn a new language that by the looks of the documentation is weak sauce then write this stuff and it is going to improve my life how?
.net it makes sense.
I don't get it. I will stick to
to me it just sounds like we need more pop-up filtering commands....
my blog
of hack on top of hack on top of hack....
Will these wonders never cease?
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Part of my nefarious plan - And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids -
;-)
-- My Weblog.
This is the most insightful post I've seen on this subject.
People have seen the short-comings of Java, with the client-side operating environment practically bringing your machine to its knees
I'm sorry, but that's complete bull. I'm typing this in galeon 0.11 on a P3 450 with 256MB of RAM, with JBuilder 4 Pro (a pure Java IDE) running on another desktop, KDE2.1, KMail running, etc, and the machine is running just fine, thank you very much.
Java has come a long way in the last couple of years. True, most popular browsers still use an outdated version (1.1?), but don't let that blind you to what a real JDK can do.
I work for a web agency, and we do all our server-side work in Java (on Linux). No, I wouldn't recommend using Java client-side for a web site, but that's just because of most browsers' crappy Java support.
Personally, I'll be watching CURL with interest. I don't think it'll take off anytime soon, if at all (12meg download for a plugin? Not over a modem...), and I can't see us using it, but at least someone is trying something new.
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Please note: ESR had 150,000 shares of LNUX, and wrote this when LNUX was trading at $239 per share, as opposed to its current price of $2 per share.
And it merges markup with programming, which creates all kinds of security issues. (Think macro virii.) Especially since it doesn't run in a VM. You think Outlook/Exchange is bad, I predict Curl will be worse.
It's a Bad Thing® to mix document markup and executable code, because people are used to treating documents as non-programs, this is why email virii continue to work, despite all the warnings and experience. This is a predictable failure mode that must be designed against.
Fundamental issue: You can not trust code obtained from arbitrary sources, such code has to be strictly limited in what it is permitted to do. If you let it run at all.
...and a million other free languages for my web pages. Your language offers nothing new - and certainly not worth paying for.
tice nry
Is this similiar to Sash?
1. I don't know anyone who'd think "gee, C++ would be great to write CGI in!" Most people would laugh at such a suggestion.
2. Poor design.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Having actually built client/server commerce sites, I'd say "hell yes" *never* trust the client.
No, you don't sell something at the price the client returns to you.
What has this to do with JavaScript though? It applies regarless of whether you're using URL parameters, POSTed forms or Cookies to track what's going on.
Your comment about JavaScript makes no sense. Its either programmed correctly or its not. All JavaScript does in this situation is allow you to utilise the (mostly idle) client processor and improve your user experience (when done right).
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Who really need another Java language. I mean kaffe is great but Sun's JVM is closed source. Installing it and looking at the about box I see tons of "Portions Copyright ©" lines. Even if I like Java and writing Java code, if I should develop to a new applet capable language I would prefer see its runnable environnement open source and this one seem far away from it but to its copyrighted parts.
But more important: using it for commercial purpose you have to pay them a fee based upon its usage. I will never get into it for that. Anyone should bane such pratice.
I already have enough of the Microsoft fee on my computers, paid my web site, but paying for the usage of generating their content, no way.
--- Bouh !!! ---
I rather like my semantic web, thank you very much. Did it ever occur to you that maybe the web isn't useful to anybody because nobody has anything useful to say? ;)
While I agree with what you are saying in theory, we have presentation languages (ie. postscript, pdf) that would do quite well for transmitting your data over the web. Why don't you go bark at adobe for implementing linking in a braindead way in their PDF plugin, since that alone is why it is unsuitable as a web presentation language?
- 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.
Youch.I didn't follow this. Could you explain? (I work for Curl, so I'd like to know.) There are a couple of things going on here. First, one might deliver in Curl for functionality, development&maintenance, or bandwidth. Sometimes these are tradeoffs. More functionality (e.g., interaction on the client) MAY mean a bigger "program". Reducing graphics transfers by switching from a server-built image to procedural graphics generated on the client MAY increase development&maintenance costs. However, there are some pure win/win situations, too. HTML/XML is pretty verbose compared with Curl, so that alone saves a bit in both bandwidth and development&maintenance. Of course, that's not enough by itself and I wouldn't want people writing Web pages in Perl! It's just one thing that enters into it. More important, is basic abstraction. If you use something twice, you can define it once and reference it many times. When the abstractions take parameters (i.e., are procedures), you really win on both bandwidth and development&maintenance. The biggest win, though, comes when there are multiple interactions. Build a layout and interaction mechanism once and use it in a bunch-o-projects. Once the client has it cached, they don't need to get it again. Then just send the "data" that changes with each interaction. No need to resend what hasn't changed and no need to flicker the user's screen. Smaller, faster, better. Yes, this part is the same idea as XML, and the transfered "data" might very well be encoded in XML. You could think of Curl technology as a way to deploy a specialized XML viewer. By combining these (including the procedural graphics), we're seeing order of magnitude bandwidth decreases. Since big sites pay for bandwidth, the decreases more than offset the cost of a commercial use of the technology. The snapier and more fun interactions for the user are a bonus.
Howard Stearns - I work at Curl Corporation, but I speak for myself.
The infrastructure and many protocols were already in place.
TBL did invent HTTP, HTML, and the use of the URL which proved very successful for the task, however, and very innovative compared to WAIS and Gopher which were already running. The URL is really what allowed many protocols to be tied together conveniently.
-Kevin
You might be appalled, but are you really all that surprised? I'm surprised that you think the average Slashdotter would know any better. You've got to admit that finding ignorance here is like shooting fish in a barrel.
I am sick to death of companies that promise Linux versions of
software "coming soon".
From now on, if a company does not release the Linux version
of its software on exactly the same day (or before) the Windows
version, I will do everything in my power to dissaude people
from using that companies products.
The CURL company qualifies. Let the war begin. CURL must die.
-Rick
From the website's linked news release. ." (Emphasis mine).
"Curl Corp is aware of that [middleware] need and plans to eventually add features, such as database connectivity
Nuff said - this isn't anywhere near mature enough to be more than a toy.
http://www.eaijournal.com/PDF/Curl.pdf (August 2001)
Sig under construction since 1998.
Yes, I said BASIC.
So you can bankrupt some company just by sitting there clicking "reload" all day?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The first is that Curl is not free (don't stop reading, I'm not a zealot). If you are a commercial entity wishing to publish Curl content, you have to pay Curl Corp. a licensing fee. Writing a free Curl enginge is likely to be irrelevant, as you pay Curl Corp. to use Curl content, not to use their software. HTML, JavaScript, C++, Java and many others are free. Write a compiler or interpreter, and anybody can use them.
To gain widespread use on the web, a language should not require the publisher to pay where the current languages don't. Unless it's incredibly much better than anything available today. It must surely have some real killer features if companies are to be interested in converting their sites to Curl. The larger the company, the less likely they are to convert (Curl licensing is by volume), and the more likely they are to influence what the smaller companies do.
The second reason, and it's a smaller but still relevant question, is cross platform portability. Curl's homepage lists the system requirements as Windows 95/98/NT, Netscape or IE, with Linux and Mac "coming soon". But there are an incredible amount of browsers out there already for platforms that are not on the desktop.
One of the things that made the web great is that it is not dependant on a particular manufacturer to implement their product on a particular platform. Anybody can write a HTML- and JavaScript-browser if they have the time and skills. Opera wouldn't have seen the light of day had Curl been the standard.
Then there's the question of e.g. proxies. There are lots and lots of products in use today that work on HTML, e.g. cacheing and filtering proxies, that will not work with Curl. Whether Curl publishes standards so that proxy/filter manufacturers can implement Curl support remains to be seen. As does whether a proxy counts as a publisher and should thus pay royalties to Curl Corp.
I don't see Curl as a serious replacement for HTML/Java/JavaScript/C++ anytime soon. Perhaps under a modified licensing agreement, with published standards, big corporations would consider a switch and smaller would follow. But for today I don't think Curl stands a chance, regardless of technical merits.
It has been designed to be secure. In any case, I don't see how the security issues are any different than those in Java and Javascript. Why would Java become less secure if you added the capability to directly support markup?
The business model for Curl is laughable. It is based on an MIT conceit that the programming language is all important. When I looked at the Curl stuff a few years back it looked like yet another attempt to make C look like Lisp. Yeah whatever but Lisp does quite a good job of looking like Lisp.
If you have to download a plug in to use the language you might as well write the code in C# and be done with it. The guys who wrote C# are at least as smart as the guys in 545 Tech square.
Ward did not strike me as being the live wire of the lab, nor for that matter did his students. Dertousos is just the Director, like Negroponte he does not do, he presents, unlike Negroponte however I doubt that many grad students would go to talk to Detousos for inspiration.
Bottom line is I did not see people queueing up to learn Curl inside Tech square so I don't see why anyone outside the building is likely to use it.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
...which is code name "Root Kit".
There are just so many applications available as people have different requisites. Why should it be for programming languages any different? I guess it's the 'new thing' paradigmn that a automically repulses people, even before looking at it.
i think the issue here (at least for developers) is the idea that this new language requires a plug-in for the client. imho, anything that's web based but still requires the client to go out and download something else is a _bad thing_ (pure multimedia notwithstanding). here at my company we've had an applet in beta for a long time because our potential end users don't like the idea of having to download the latest jre plug-in.
now, if the curl plug-in became a standard part of our browser, then i could see it gaining wider acceptance, though i still think it would be a limited adoption simply due to its roots in javascript.
Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. --Ludwig Wittgenstein
Are you sure you didn't change your font?
Mozilla 0.9.3 (Win2k--hey I'm at work) is showing all of your symbols pefectly.
I read the internet for the articles.
Curl is old news. It was on slash possibly six months ago. Even back then it sounded stupid. Well, not stupid, but just not realistic.
Think about it: in order for Curl to work, the end user has to download a plugin. Most people who surf the internet don't know what a plugin is and as a result won't be able to receive Curl unless a savvy friend sets them up with it.
The only situation in which this has worked (plugins, that is) is for Flash. Flash works by plugin and people love flash. But Flash most of the time comes bundled with browsers so it is almost to the level of a standard.
Basically what I'm trying to get at is that unless Curl can get a large minority of web-users using the Curl plugin soon, they won't make it. It's not one of those things that can creep into the web frontier because they've based their business around it and need it to succeed quickly to succeed at all.
Why dont these people understand that a proprietary language will fail. Why the hell would I pay to use this crap ? This a rather lame attempt to own a corner of the market
Kick ass website
(I work for Curl, but speak for myself, as Howard said.) You missed the point, actually. Had all of the TerraServer data been downloaded as a JPG, it would have been ENORMOUS and taken forever on your connection. (Orders of magnitude larger than the plugin, AFAIK.) The point is that, with Curl, you can implement nifty client-side behavior -- like loading JPGs on demand and showing different resolutions if you like. The cool thing about our TerraServer demo is that it loads the low-res images first, so you can see *something* while it loads the bigger ones. You yourself complained about how long that process took. Why on earth would you want to wait for it up front? That's not logical at all. In any event, the point wasn't that this is an effective TerraServer app. It's that you can do this sort of thing fairly easily using Curl. Surely you know of something more useful to do. Perhaps you should try it. ;-)
Damian
Hey there - you're treading dangerously close to infringing on McAfee's patent.
Using a browser to download code that is then executed automatically on the client side could land you in court!
Culture is more than commerce
I was just noticing that it broke the functionality of my mouse wheel when I ran their demo, then to my surpise IE shuts down and TextPad pops up with the following message:
C ore/MemoryManager/refill.c:38: !a->being_collected
*** Fatal Curl Error! ***
Assertion failed in c:/cygwin/scratch-auto/automated-build-temp/curl/
******* Aborting! *******
Strange behavior.
load "linux",8,1
No, I don't miss the point.
You can sometimes update code without having to update content and vice versa even with systems reputed to be bad at separating one from the other.
What do you mean, HTML "separated out into templates?" The templates have code in them indicating (at the very least) what data goes where.
My example is not silly. I chose a simple example to prove that it was not contrived. There are plenty of more complicated situations in which content/code naturally interact in a way more complicated than tools claiming "separation" can deal with.
"A man alone in the forest talking to himself and no women around to hear him. Is he still wrong?"
"A woman alone in the forest talking to herself with no men around to hear her. Is she still crazy?"
Men are stupid and women are crazy.
PS. I like your sig!
anyone else notice that links posted to /. comments have a tendency to have extra " "'s inserted? what's up with that?
Interesting trivia: Travelocity's web front end is written entirely in C++, and executes as a CGI to their web servers. There's some database code there, of course, for talking to Sabre, but mostly what it does is generate HTML.
You'd think C++ would be a good language for CGI, with the standard library and whatnot, but they've encountered a problem. The C++ object overhead keeps their application from scaling the way it should.
The Travelocity web front end is run on a big load-balanced cluster of 32-processor SGI Origin servers (mostly 2000s with a just-placed order for four 3000s). Overkill for a web site? Hardly. An analyst friend of mine told me that Travelocity's code spends as much time in object instantiation and destruction as it does in actual page generation.
Of course, it's still many, many times faster and more efficient than similar code written in Perl or PHP or another interpreted language would be. But C++ is not without its disadvantages.
(Posting this anonymously for two reasons: first, I don't wanna get in trouble talking about Travelocity is such detail. But more importantly, I just started a major software project that will have a CGI interface and be written in C++. I don't want to cast doubts on my own design!
New Language CURL Merges HTML And Javascript
A whole new language to replace the <script> tag. What wonders will they come up next.
In a separate note, Nicodaemos announced today that he is releasing his new language, Hurl, at the masses. "Many people in the industry are very excited about this new language." says Nico. "In fact, Steve Ballmer was heard to say that this is one language he just couldn't keep down."
Nico states that "Though the software is free, Hurl makes money by metering and charging fees to businesses that 'Hurl' down their users throats." "It's very exciting technology.", says Nico, "Companies will be able to send their content as projectiles to a user's browser in chunks." "Other languages are very watered down. They're here and then they're gone. Hurl sticks to you and seeps into places within your organization you never thought possible. And it's persistent. Even though you don't see it, you'd swear you could smell it. Hurl leaves a lasting impression on you."
This isn't all marketing hype. Hurl does seem to be gaining momentum with developers. One developer was recently heard to say, "... Passports, C#, .NET ... Jeez it all just makes me want to Hurl!"
The prediction business is very tricky and although I'm not a psychic, I'm predicting that the upcoming release of Windows XP looks like it will drive many to Hurl, in a big way.
They should admit the same thing: people who claim code/content "separation" have no idea what they're talking about. You can make code embedded in content more concise, but the word "separation" in this context is a lie. There is always a point where code and content meet. The only question is how much of what the code does is hidden/abstracted.
Generally, the way to silence people claiming code/content separation is to ask for an example solving a simple problem that doesn't fit their assumptions about what dynamic web content looks like.
Now when someone says "curl" do they mean Curl(tm) the scripting language, cURL, the tool for getting files referenced in a URL, or curl, del cross a vector field?
and other internal networks. Unfortunately, most companies I have worked at prefer a Windows-only policy for network access and client machines. Such an environment AFAIK, only exists in some corporations. But it still exists. "New language CURL ditches all existing web work for a proprietary, windows-only format."
You're thinking "what end-user would want to spend that kind of money and put up with those restrictions?" The proper question, though, is "how many corporations would consider the benefits of Curl to be worth setting up a Curl server on their intranet?"
(Of course, the answer may be "not enough to give the VCs anything close to the return on investment they were hoping for"...)
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
Ignore the rampant criticism that you'll see in here. There is life past C. Even if the language is trash, which I doubt, there may be some pearls in there that are worth learning. In the "old" days of computing, where we had many languages to choose from (APL/Lisp/Forth/Cybil (had to throw that in, sorry) Pilot/C/Fortran/Balm/Scheme), those of us that were interested could study and learn new things, ideas, ways of thinking. Sure, we all find comfort in our "cruise control" coding of strcpy(3) calls, but strive to look for new ways of doing things. And I don't mean reverting to Perl. I'm just glad some groups are innovating out there - my gcc wheels are digging a big rut in the road already.
I had no idea who Tim Burns-Lee was.
I found him here.
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/
Ascii artist &
IBM has been flogging this sort of Windows only crap for some time now (aka Sash) at http://alphaworks.ibm.com/aw.nsf/frame?ReadForm&/a w.nsf/techmain/78632A94B6EED5038825680100023A32
Flash per se doesn't compete with tools put out by Microsoft - Curl does - so I doubt you'll ever see Curl as a default plugin distributed with Windows/IE...not while C# and ASP are being pushed as web development tools by MS. Goodbye Curl.
You assume your hardware is powerfull however we are quickly moving toward the use of minimal systems to interact with the net. Do I want to locally compile and process a load of data on my flash new mobile phone? No Sir...
The era of the PC is coming to a close - we are moving towards lots of small tailored solutions - mobile phones, settop boxes and the like. You won't be browsing the web (at home) from a PC - it will be a TV...
heh! Your suggestion *might just work* though I doubt it will become popular. Very soon it should be possible to do what you are suggesting with mozilla, there are efforts to get the current CSS+XUL+XBL+RDF+JS ui to be stored in a "compiled" format. The same I suppost can be done for HTML. As for the many languages? In mozilla you can everything in javascript via DOM: i.e. build xml/html documents, create/attach stylesheets, create/get rdf datasources, add events...
First, Javascript is a good idea. The language is small easy to use and gets the job done.
Second the implementation in current browsers leaves a little to be wanting.
Lets talk about the merits of the language if we are going to slam it. Do not talk about a language being inherently good or bad OR the implementation of the LANGUAGE being good or bad if you are just going to be critical of the stupid things people do with JavaScript.
People do stupid things in ANY programming language on ANY platform EVERYWHERE.
I am not sure what the point was to your post other than to be sarcastic or funny.
Any web developers worth a grain of salt knows that you can't trust data from the client. For every bit of JavaScript data validation I have written there is a nice set of validation routines the data is put through ON the server.
I think inexperienced developers may put the work to the client exclusively but this again has nothing to do with the merits or flaws of JavaScript as a language IMO.
I have been using client side validation for as long as I have developed web applications (almost five years now). When people use our intranet we require them to use JavaScript. Why? It enhances the user experience enough that the use of JavaScript is justifiable. 999/1000 times the client is not trying to hack you. What does it hurt to do a little client side validation. This will get 99% of your bad data. Then you ship it to your server validation routines and it all goes smoothly. No extra trips back to the client/server just to validate the data and get the required information in the proper format... all done in one trip to the server. This not only makes an application more robust it makes the application feel smoother for the end user.
My point being people complain about JavaScript when truly they are complaning about the implementations of other developers, Not the browser implementation and Not the actual language itself. It is just easier to say its all crap and ignore it and blame other developers for being idiots right?
Jeremy
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Did any of you try it? Downloading the plugin took longer than downloading many real programs, and then in the middle of the install it downloaded more programs. Kind of annoying. So then I go to try their demonstration. It takes the Curl plug-in about a minute to load - completely unacceptable. Then I try scrolling around on the terra server map. At first all looks good, very fast and fluid. Then I get away from the center of the map and it's all fuzzy/pixelated. After waiting a while, it gets clearer, the map is apparently not all there until you scroll over some of it. Well - is that not utterly pointless if the reason you have this plugin is to scroll around faster? The entire map never stayed resident in memory, it was continually fuzzing out areas i wasn't looking at. Sorry, but a plain ordinary jpg that would admittedly take a few seconds to download would let me scroll over the whole thing and see it clearly, or print it out. The solution is a faster net connection, not this mess.
I remember seeing this years ago. It was called Active X.
How is this platform going to be any better than Java. I don't see anyone discussing using this language. Did anyone even care enough to try and find a language definition? Did anyone care enough to install this plug-in?
Flash is every that client-side Java wanted to be, only more stable and cross-platform.
btw, is there a way to script COM objects from Flash's ActionScript (on Win32 obviously)? You can do it from JavaScript and VBScript, but I couldn't find anything in the (limited) ActionScript documentation.
cpeterso
Yep, and now we have yet another possibility of getting out computers hacked. Hmm, with all IE, IIS, JavaScript and now this, it is turining into hacker heaven ;-)
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
... and hasn't everyone got one of them?
That's what the web's about - bringing equal usability and functionality to everyone with damned expensive hardware running (Bill's) damned expensive OS with damned expensive bandwidth. Oh, and a simple reliable browser which can fit only as few as 10 DVDs and only overwrites half your operating system.
Shit - I forgot yanks don't understand irony.
This sig made only from recycled ASCII
...strictly, bullets kill people...
Not intended to replace HTML - will be like Flash and Java - along side and inside HTML. Not only will they get bashed again, but it'll happen without being given a thorough check first - typical blind ranting.
First of all, I'm the main author and developer and I'm based in Sweden. AFAIK, curl.com does only have a registered trademark on curl in the US. There's no registered "trademark" ("varumärke" in swedish) on the word curl.
Secondly, we used the name curl already *before* curl.com registered their trademark 'curl' in may 1998 (we released curl 4.0 in march 1998).
Thirdly, we've used the name curl widely, extensively and openly all over the internet for three and a half years. It would be a little late to claim any exclusive rights to it. Wouldn't it? (When I use google to search for 'curl', the first two links I get are related to our project, with curl.com coming as the third link.)
Further, we're a friendly bunch. We won't sue anyone and I don't think they'll do that either.
Of course! My cell phone (which my provider gave me for free) is MUCH cheaper than my bandwidth (which I fork out $30/month for).
It still holds...a lot of thin client technology sucks because bandwidth is expensive and hardware is not.
As for your comment about the "era of the PC coming to a close"...I suppose I'm going to balance my checkbook on my TV too? And do my taxes? And play games? And write letters to mom? If so, then my "TV" sounds a heck of a lot like a PC to me!
HTML was not designed for the purpose of creating high-quality websites.
:)
It was merely designed for the purpose of creating text-based pages including images for wide-spread information sharing over the internet. Hence the term Hyper Text Markup Language.
Although HTML has come a long way there is still much room for improvement. DHTML has helped some but has proven to add little flexibility in HTML code.
So CURL, combining HTML and JavaScript, will not provide any justice in revolutionizing the web.
Big deal if it makes it go faster. Most HTML pages aren't *too* big. The big deal is functionality.
A bigger issue to tackle, probably more important, is:
To completely re-do the HTML code language, and possibly include all the previous HTML tags and JavaScript compatibility to obtain universality (ie. how about a internal page function to check whether a link is 404'd?)
Re-release it as perhaps the GHTML 6.0 standard. (Graphical Hypertext Markup Language?)
Update browsers (this is where Netscape/AOL dies! hehe)
Plus HTML and JavaScript are so standard that they are near impossible to compete with.
After all, everyone uses HTML to make webpages now. The new HTML could even be more advanced so that less-important pages written by amateurs just to play around wouldn't even make their way to HTTP servers and thus partially removing the www of clutter. Although what has made HTML quite popular has been its flexibilty when allowing simple users to create their own websites.
In other words, it would be useless to merge existing HTML and JavaScript together. Both are in need of too many improvements. Instead, why not work on improving / redoing existing code languages?
And, oh yeah, it's got to be completely free.
- A. NawnEem-Huss
Not mainly. It is almost a description language.
It's interesting. People have seen the short-comings of Java, with the client-side operating environment practically bringing your machine to its knees, not to mention certain IE vulnerabilities with older versions of JDK. So we tried to move away from that environment by performing server-side processing. ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, and the ever-powerful PHP. Why is it that we want to go away from the server-side arena when we know what it is like?
Now the reason I'm directly mentioning PHP is because this plugin boasts the ability to merge C++ with your webpages. Well, you can write CGI with C++, but that is usually rather painful. PHP is (to me) Perl and C/C++ all wrapped into one. You want classes? Sure, you got them. You want great string manipulation? Sure, that's there too. Not to mention you can embed Javascript in their if you NEED to use it. And now that PHP supports some level of GTK for graphics, why would you even want to use Java, especially since you can ram all the Shockwave and Macromedia Flash into a PHP-generated page that you want? I just don't see the benefit, if there is any, of trying this, when server-side dynamic pages have proven to be incredible, and give all and even more functionality that this product boasts. Who knows though, maybe it will be better than we all expect.
Unabashed plug for a sensible programming language: NetRexx on the other hand is FREE, is object oriented, and generates Java which can run anywhere, and is combines the best of oo and procedural code, IMHO.
Slightly veering off topic... We stumbled on a hilarious site the other day. Finish drinking your milk first then, check out www.dangeorge.com
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
a few months back? I obviously installed the thing for a reason, but I can't remember where I heard about it...?
Course I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, between one thing and another
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
and the downside to that woudl be?????
I wonder if there are any trademark issues pending with libcurl?
I know what happens when you let lawyers loose, but the legal page did seem a little over-the-top.
Remove Tim Berners-Lee, and Curl offers nothing. And he is out to make a buck from Curl.
With all due respect to Tim Berners-Lee (and we owe him heaps), thanks for Curl but no thanks.
Being sceptical about succes does not mean it's a bad idea, I'm doing some research myself, on a new language of which I'm not too sure about its success - but still, it's a good idea.
Bizar technology?
my first FP wont even go through, been trying for a coupla minutes, so I guess i make a real post. I think this will turn out to be a decent language, but whether or not it can break java's foothold remains to be seen. didnt we have this story already though? i remember something about it a while ago
I'm using that approach even in most non-web applications I write these days.
http://freshmeat.net/projects/curl//
http://freshmeat.net/redir/curl/1612/url_homepage
Anyway, this other new curl plugin brings to mind those several kernels of popcorn in the bottom of the bag that will never pop. The internet has many such kernels.
Yeah, for example, I usually use much less Trademark Symbols when I try to use them "humorously®". (The only exception is when a Really Bad Crash happens, or something of equal magnitude.)
(Speaking of which, Mozilla hasn't showed the symbol correctly since 0.9.1... It used to work but now it renders it as ^(TM). Should check Bugzilla some day... =( )
I don't know about you, but out of those three, I only use Unix. And besides, those are just as "monolithic" as you purport Curl to be. PHP and Perl don't share the same runtime...
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
What is wrong with trademarks?
They help the consumer distinguish between reputable products and cheap imitations.
Would you be happy if the Herman Miller Aeron you just purchased for US$700 was actually an fraud, made out of cheap plastic and manufactured by underpaid laborers in Taiwan. Trademark law helps you to make sure you are getting the Real Thing(TM).
As for patents, it depends on how they are enforced.
| Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
What will the fine folks who made cUrl ("the client that groks the urls") say of this ?
:)
If I had a chance to sue some vaporware e-bullshit company out of existence, I'd sure jump on the occasion
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I've suggested this before, but it would not be very hard to add this to slashcode, to make it easier on the editors. Yeah, (-1 Offtopic) but there ain't no Meta section.
If the editors don't like combing through a submission queue, then they need to make the queue smarter to do the most tedious tasks. Then they can focus on other things, like learning the word 'than' or getting support engineers to quit their jobs.
[
Might even be the previous issue for you US readers (got it in the mail yesterday, though).
---
Real computer scientists only write specs for languages that might run on future hardware. Nobody trusts them to write specs for anything homo sapiens will ever be able to fit on a single planet.
Fabien BERNARD.
By combining the best parts of the worst online programming languages we have managed to create a program that will bring your system down faster than any java applet or flash program could ever hope to accomplish with the added benefit of showing you as many popup pr0n ads as possible before reaching total meltdown.
User represents, warrants and covenants that (a) User is 18 years old or older;
So high schoolers can't use their web site? That's rich.
As much as I loathe almost everything that MS has put out in the last few years, even I have to admit that there comes a point where there are too many applications, check that, too many poorly written applications that do the same thing.
I personally wouldn't mind seeing more software developed by anyone, including MS, if they would only develop it properly. For example, basic security measures, properly coded, properly interfaced with other applications, etc.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Is HTML not also a production language?
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
The fact is that javascript, as a technology, can only be depended on in the following situations:
- Corporate Intranets, where you know EXACTLY what everyone's browser and security settings are (which, for those of you who've done this stuff will know, really doesn't hold true, but you can just fsck over the non-stands)
- Completely aesthetic functionality. Functionality that doesn't break the site if it's missing... i.e., you should be able to destroy anything between <script> and </script>, or anything beginning with javascript: and have the site still be usable.
- Completely redundant functionality. i.e. stuff that may make the site a bit easier to use (popup information about links, perhaps, or tree views that don't require a page reload), in which case you're now writing a version of the code for IE, a version of the code for NS, and a version of the code for non-js. 3x code writing = a lot more work, and a lot more chance for bugs.
Javascript, as a client language, could have been awesome, but the fact is that it's really only has limited usefulness on a well programmed website.Slay a dragon... over lunch!
An entire super-corporate web site, and not a single obvious place to see some source...
One of these days/I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
We didn't slam it enough the first time so they're sending it in for another go-around.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In particular, if you could develop a web site in a nice, unified, portable system like Curl, maybe you have have a development system or compiler that could intelligently divide the work on the client or server based on the static things like the nature of the pages, and perhaps dynamic things like the bandwidth of the connection or the load on the server. In contrast, Curl as currently specified is just a better client-side technology, and a heavyweight and nonstandard one at that.
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."
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
If I'm a business corporation looking to improve something like my company Intranet using a tool like this, I'd be thinking it's pretty cool until I hit this line:
"...We charge commercial customers based on the volume of Curl content executed..."
I think the cost aware boss has no reason not to stick with either Perl or PHP, both of which can bring incredible functionality to the web without having expense or browser or platform worries dragging in tow.
RFC2119
I find the idea of basing the bulk of internet sites on one company's proprietary application to be quite scary. I mean, imagine what kind of control and power(i.e.wealth) this company will have someday once the majority of sites worldwide are written exclusively for their technology...
Oh wait, Microsoft has already accomplished that with Microsoft IE/.NET/SmartTags/etc. Nevermind.
sigh,
Brien Voorhees
How did HTML and CSS get started? Was it a company like this? or an orginization?
Anyway, they haven't made a good impression on me so far, with there .PDF's (.PDFs are NOT a web document! All I want to do is read it. Not print the danm thing out) and their annoying 'web installer', which seems to be all the rav these days (what happens when I disconnect? Will it resume? Who knows, they didn't bother telling me). And as someone else said, they seem to like TM's and patents.[/RANT]
It allows you to do everything in one language instead of a mishmash of HTML, Javascript, and Flash. It is fully object-oriented with static typing for good code generation while also allowing dynamic typing for rapid prototyping. It is JIT compiled directly to machine code -- there is no intervening VM. It supports advanced language features like closures, parameterized types, dynamic code evaluation, and built-in support for units. It has very powerful graphics and gui libraries. It has a built-in XML parser. It has built-in support for versioning, in fact, every Curl applet or package must begin with a herald identifying the Curl API version, as in:
{curl 1.5 applet}
This will allow us to continue to support applets and packages that were written for earlier versions of the Curl API. It has a strong client-side security model but still permits storage of client-side persistent data by untrusted applets. It is suitable for producing both documents and programs, in fact all of our internal and external documentation is written in Curl (for that matter, Curl Surge and Surge Lab are themselves implemented almost entirely in Curl).
Although Curl is usable as a scripting language (through the 'curl' executable that is included with the Surge Lab download), it is not intended to compete with other scripting languages such as Python. We have no illusions that people will drop their favorite application and scripting languages to use the Curl language, but we do believe that it satisfies a missing need in the client-side web-content niche.
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.]
... .pcurl format; you cannot distribute applets in .pcurl format." -- Ibid.
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
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.)
"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
They received $5,000,000 from DARPA. Unlike some type of a military contract company that is "helping our national defense", these clowns indend to charge the people who paid them to develop it, to use it. I wish someone would give me some free money to make something for them, then charge them to use it. Charging is such an understatement here, I'd have to say extorting. This is complete BS. As far as I'm concerned, TBL has sold out. Don't trust anything else this person does from now on.
I have been using client side validation for as long as I have developed web applications (almost five years now). When people use our intranet we require them to use JavaScript.
And all the sysadmins, and every clueful technical user in your company hates you. Why? Because they have to enable Javascript to use your Intranet site, and then quickly turn it off before revisiting the Net at large?
And why is that? You already know why, but you're shoving Javascript down your fellow employees' throats for your own convenience: Client-side Javascript in Web browsers has proven time and again to be one of the biggest security disasters in existence.
You say that's an implementation problem? Fine, show me even one browser implementation where Javascript cannot be used to steal the user's files, to pop up an endless series of windows so that the user has to kill his browser or X11 to recover, and to implement spyware. All I ask is one. It can even be a sucky browser, rather than, say, Galeon, Mozilla, Konqueror, or Skipstone.
Until you do, Javascript remains a trap for the clueless -- and you are shooting your co-workers in the foot. At any sane company, one where the Web staff are not allowed to run amok at the company's expense, that would be forcibly curtailed by management decree.
Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com
Once it is downloaded, WHY would i want it to leave memory?
:)
What advantage is there in scrolling fast, if you can only scroll fast in low res?
Sorry, i prefer downloading a file rather than 'streaming' this jpg to me, a one time wait is worth it.
I REALLYYYYY hope that your app doesn't expect users to be 'logical', cater to user's actual desires, not what you think would be logical. The solution to my download problem to me is obvious, a T3.
This seems to me to be in direct competition with a number fo XML technologies. By sending XML to the client and getting it to do the leg work (via XSLT, SMIL, SVG, Javascript, etc.) you can keep bandwidth usage down while having all the flashy stuff people seem to be demanding (are they really?) from the web these days. Plus it's XML, so it's easy to work with, fast, easy to pull the data into other applications, and a W3C web standard. Why CURL isn't based on an XML grammar I don't know (perhaps I should read more of their page, but I found it too full of corporate bs for my liking).
...is to generate press releases, news articles and Slashdot threads. I've never heard anyone use it. I just hear people pointing it out to each other and saying: "Tim Berners-Lee backs it." As if that automatically makes it more interesting than all of the other languages (client and server side) out there.
Pay as you go looks like a pretty clear way to kill a programming language to me...
Uhgg "Bob Battys in the bellfry", I thought I would never see his face again after quiting Xaos Droolz with over 6K in back pay owed. Sometimes life ain't fair.
Since we mentioned PHP, I remembered that cURL is actually... yesterday's news. I am not sure why it is mentioned as a "new language" in the article. I develop PHP, and, as far as I remember, the first mention of cURL on the mailing list was well over a year ago. That's a good millenia in software life terms...
Jobs? Which jobs?
Actually, flash isn't that bad, but it fails in the sense of being more complicated than HTML for the beginner.
I rather like my semantic web, thank you very much.
So do I, I'm sure there are some useful uses for it. I just don't think that it should be the only solution for everyone.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe the web isn't useful to anybody because nobody has anything useful to say? ;)
Yes. Did I stick with the notion? No, I find that people often have interesting viewpoints in real-life, so a general planet-wide lack of brain-activity cannot be the reason for the apparent lack of intelligent content on the web.
While I agree with what you are saying in theory, we have presentation languages (ie. postscript, pdf) that would do quite well for transmitting your data over the web.
Yes, postscript and pdf are excellent page-description languages for printers. But they are not intended for dynamic interactive web-content. Flash and Curl is, however.
Why don't you go bark at adobe for implementing linking in a braindead way in their PDF plugin, since that alone is why it is unsuitable as a web presentation language?
Well, I don't tend to bark at people for random reasons, and can't understand why anyone would want me to. Besides, the major reason pdf is unsuitable as a web presentation language is because it is a paper presentation language, and those two are different notions. Imho, the linking was an ill-thought-out feature that could only have come from the marketing department anyway. I'm still surprised somebody actually tries to use it.
What else should he have invented before being called the guy who "shovelled all the coal" for the WWW?
HTTP, HTML and URLs are the very things that make the WWW different from the other stuff that existed on the internet. The only things he built on were computers (keyboards, mice, monitor, etc.) and the fact that a bunch of them were connected and could talk using TCP/IP.
I dont think ever.
That's where Curl is wrong. It's not open, it's paid for, it's politically strong.
If MIT's money people were to make a new HUGE language, they could have simply developed a framework to unify things.
Face it. Monolithic Concepts never work. Physics doesnt allow it, neither will Compsc.
Look at VB. Why doesnt MS write its apps in VB? coz its ONE concept.
Look at PHP+Perl+Unix+etc - see? many things.... stable, compatible, used by every one.
I'm not a MS lawyer, but this is what I think:
Time to dump those CURL books and pickup the .NET Packages.
ooooh. Can you say hyperbole. The ultimate edge! Does this mean we have to drink Pepsi Max when we go curling up to The Ultimate Edge of the Internet (TM). Sounds like hype HYPE HYPE to me. I consider myself, the ultimate edge of the internet =) You can be an ultimate edge to if you like.
IE 5.0 was way ahead of its time with support for XML parsing, XML DOM, XSL-T, XML Schemas on top of the usual very strong support for Cascading Stylesheet, JavaScript and VBScript, HTML DOM and HTML 4.0.
Since the W3C was taking forever to release the definitions of what are now well-established standards, IE5.0's XML-technologies were mainly based on microsoft-defined standards which were already pretty close to standards in the making within the W3C. All those components were part of what was called "MSXML 2.5".
What did that platform give you? Absolutely *everything* you need to build an entire very complex browser-driven application, whose main functionality would live on the client rather than the server. This means that once you "loaded" a "page", you could interact with form inputs, links or anything else on the page, and see changes being reflected "on-the-fly" on the presentation layer while also affecting an in-memory XML DOM representing some user-specific XML data.
Shortly after IE5 came out, the company I work for wanted to build a comprehensive platform for technical writers to build "walkthroughs, FAQs, and HOW-TO's" pieces of documentation. They wanted that documentation to be stored in an XML format so it could be saved in a platform/presentation-neutral way, so it could be represented in various ways internally as well as externally to the company's millions of customers as a big "knowledge base".
The traditional way to build such a platform would have been to hire a couple of Java or C++ programmers who would manually create complex GUI components to give the application the interactivity and intuitivity it needs on top of a complex data-handling layer. You're talking about months and months of design and hard-core coding. They wanted it done it 3 weeks. So I said a couple of guys and I could make it all work within IE5 and a couple perl scripts on the server. All the GUI components would be built using HTML 4.0 and CSS. The data layer would be handled with IE5' support for XML parsing and XML DOM. Interaction between user, GUI and data would be handled via JavaScript and HTML events. Once a user would be done editing a piece of documentation, hitting the "save" button would simply HTTP POST an XML string to a perl script which would save all that into a file into some well-defined directory structure.
So we made it happen. Granted I didn't sleep much for a while due to the countless feature creeps that turned the application into a very complex one. But it's very cool and it works really well.
The tech writers have built well over 3000 pieces of documentation used company-wide and by our users. All that documentation is in XML and usually presented in various HTML formats for the various audiences, thru series of batch XSL-T processing.
Since then Microsoft has released "MSXML 3.0" which is a pretty-much standards-compliant version of all the XML technologies supported by IE. I'm not sure they're 100% yet but it's pretty darn close. And I believe the upcoming IE6.0 will be even more standards-compliant.
The main drawback of this plaform is that all those cool features currently only work in IE5+ for windows, the Mac version doesn't support all that stuff yet.
Microsoft should look into turning all those IE5-specific features into a separate browser plug-in that could work within other browsers. Still, in light of all this, Curl doesn't impress me too much yet.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Less syntactically clunky than the html/javascript combination. They'll regret resurrecting the "let" keyword, though.
cURL is a library that transfers files via protocols that use URL syntax. Given the trademark happy nature of the web site mentioned in this article, I suspect that there'll be a name fight in the future.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Your second article on Curl reminded me that I never uninstalled it after the first article. Thanks!
--Steve
The point, if I'm not mistaken, is not to move everything to the client - just the interactive UI and some processing that can be done locally. Shit, I have a 500mhz chip sitting here at 5% utilization when I'm browsing. If the pages I'm looking at can be a little more dynamic and interactive and much more like a real application and not just a disparate set of pieces of paper linked to each other, than hell yes use my CPU.
The web needs something to liven it up .. too static.
i really don't want to have to install another plugin to view web pages. first it was flash, then shockwave... now i've got so many plugins weighing down my poor browser that i don't even know what i have in there.
if curl is going to become a standard like javascript and html, then support for it needs to be built into the browser
"I just want to thank my coach Eric a.k.a. Disco for shattering my reality..."
You want spaghetti code? You got it.
Is it just me, or does Curl seem very Lisp influenced?
again? http://slashdot.org/articles/01/04/06/1335241.shtm l
Which I wouldn't mind, except I think I already have something like that called the MacroMedia Flash Plug-in, well in my case Flash.
Only with Flash, I don't have to worry about too much about the learning curve that comes with Curl's seven different integer primitives because ActionScript is a weiner'd down version of ECMAScript.
Moreover, I can leverage Flash & ActionScript on the client side with languages I already know, and are usually available on the server side, such as PHP, Ruby, Perl ... along with the vast libraries associated with languages (fun stuff).
Similarly, MacroMedia has opened up it's file format that has given rise to a variety of UNIX, Win and MAC development solutions.
Considering all this, do I really need CURL ?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Yes you can translate but it's like dewatermarking a copyrighted music file, it sounds and looks like shit.
... I don't recall for certain if a general proof was submitted, but I do know that a paper was to be presented at a technical forum some months ago demonstrating that all of the major watermarking approaches being considered by the RIAA could be removed with no discernable degradation in the music.
Actually, de-watermarking copyrighted files has been demonstrated to work with no discernable degradation in audio quality. There may have even been a general mathematical proof presented that any watermark which does not leave a discernable trace in the watermarked file can be removed without leaving a discernable trace
The paper in question is available on the internet, although it was never formally presented at the conference due to legal threats under the DMCA from the commercial entities promoting the watermarking technology, who obviously had a vested interest in keeping this information quiet and promoting the mistaken notion that watermarking can be an effective deterrent to copyright violation (and perhaps even fair use).
It is interesting that the industry which relies most heavily on copyright, the computer software industry, learned more than a decade ago that copy protection schemes, along with watermarking schemes, were unworkable and ultimately a waste in resources and dumped the entire approach altogether. This lesson, which demonstrated itself in no uncertain terms in the large profits of software houses despite their lack of copy protection and the ease with which their copyrights can be (and likely are) violated, has apparently been lost on the entertainment industry, due perhaps in no small part to organizations like the SDMI group who prey upon the entertainment industry's niavite with respect to copy protection and watermarking for their own purposes.
I suspect ultimately the Copyright Cartels (MPAA, RIAA, etc.) will find they have been taken to cleaners far more by their own "copy protection" vendors, who have sold them a bill of goods even the DMCA's most draconian provisions can't compensate for, than by their customers' fair use practices and even outright copyright violations. Seeing this lightbulb go on in a Hollywood Mogul's eye would be an event worth paying admission to see.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Lucky for us, and too bad for them it won't fly. People who have actually worked on large-scale web development already know that mixing code and content in this way is a maintenance headache. And the others seem reasonably happy with JavaScript and VBScript.
This is probably a new release. I don't remember why I decided I wasn't interested the last time I looked it over (but it might have something to do with licensing).
Still, it wasn't really released at the time of the previous story. Maybe it's been released now.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
more accurately, fatal wounds kill people.
cpeterso
So you just add code to do IP spoofing into your script. Imagine soaking down just a cable or DSL conection with outgoing GET requests, and not having to worry about recieving the data.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
If there is one thing the web needs right now, it is freedom from the vision of the semantic web, and all those other idiotic visions keeping us from progressing further. There is nothing wrong with the semantic web per se, but it is not, and should not be the solution for everybody's needs. If the people at W3C had realized this when they started, instead of making overly complicated standards trying to catering for everyone's need, we might even have had a useful web by now. A simple presentation language for people wanting to describe layout precisely, and a still-simple HTML-variant for describing content. If you were worried about both, you would be fucked of course, but very few people are.
If you are still not convinced, let's look at a few examples:
...etc. The layout/content separation theory is good in theory, but I think it's on time to start liberating ourselves a bit from it now. It has been over 10 years with the web, and still very few are happy with the way it works.
YAPP-Message = Yet Another Previously Posted Message
rmathew.com
I thought the idea was to reduce the number of languages.
And who's idea should that be? And why? The same idea could say we should reduce the amount of applications available, or operating systems. That's actually just the way microsoft argues with XP.
There are just so many applications available as people have different requisites. Why should it be for programming languages any different? I guess it's the 'new thing' paradigmn that a automically repulses people, even before looking at it.
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
first of all. i said its not only a client side language... its quite nice on the server side in my opinion. i think its a sweet language... easy to pick up, easy to learn and very powerfull... second... write an api that is cross browser... dont be stupid and split your code over and over and over and over... its not so hard... why is it not so hard? cause its a sweet language...
....................
What's to prevent Curl Corporation, or an eager stock option holder, from writing a web robot that simply hits the Curl servers over and over driving up the characters served? In fact, this could lead to a form of economic warfare, where people/companies force other companies to spend money paying Curl instead of developing products.
This has been around a while, it was even mentioned here on slashdot!
Hrm... that is an interesting idea... now, I know a lot of sites that have sponsor banner advertisements which pay some fraction of a cent per hit, and I would assume that they have some way around someone writing a script that 'clicks' the advertisement every N seconds. Perhaps something could be done along the same lines.
Or perhaps no one thought of reload for cash idea when they came up with the pricing scheme... if so, that's just a little scary.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Hmm... some potential... especially on bandwidth considerations...
Here is an interesting quote...
But in any case, the real reason that client-side is a win is not bandwidth savings but latency. Network latency has not seen the same huge gains that have been achieved in network bandwidth, the cost of memory and CPU speed. In fact, latency is bounded by the speed of light so as CPU's get faster and faster the relative cost of network round-trips will only go up over time.
In the long run thin-client is doomed.
I think diversity in applications, OSes, and languages comperables well to diversity in nature.
:o)
When resources are rich, like in example in native forests you've a huge diversity. There are thousends of different species, some very funny, and some which effictivness are questionable. But that are the places where nature expierences with new concepts, where things may drift away for some time, seeing if they can grasp something new. In such place we humans were born, look at our brain and our long timed growup phases, we were quite some time a tolerated scion, not so survivable as the competitiours, but at some moment suddendly the larger payoffs started to revenue, actually when we were forced to go to steppe. The reason for this yet a mistery.
However compare to places where resources are minor, like in example the north pole, or desert sahara. How many different species live there? Some but not many, however they are all highly specialized to their surrondings, and pretty effective in their beeing. However this are not the breed places where new concepts are born.
I guess you can see yourselfs the parallel to computing
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Ok, try this nice example.
Go to www.glitchless.com/kingdoms and see it for yourself. Login in the game and play a little bit. Then See the size of the data the CGI send to you and the size of the HTML page generated by the script.
Now try to evaluate the speed and cost improvment done...
Question: how do I make stable, high performance, extensible, and useful web pages/apps that don't require broadband? btw they have an integrated XML parser in the runtime = XML-evangelizing mission-critical component integrators would die for a lightweight (in code sent over the wire) solution that runs in a Web browser ... mobile code interpretting and using XML.
I'm a little hesitant on any "plug-in" that acts to merge a multitude of languages. While it seems like a nice idea, just how efficient would such a thing be?
Aside from that, and the obvious compatibility issues, what are the security issues of running various apps. client side?
Old Article on slashdot. Was bashed really hard back then. Will get bashed really hard again. HTML is not going anywhere very fastm and CURL has more hoels than ActiveX
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.
I would be impressed if linux fits into 64K... after all the MS based operating system on the C64 takes up 20K itself (including the fonts but not the 1541).
Or do you have one of them fancy 2MB C64s then?
Don't install curl on anything you don't want crashed. BSODs for everyone.
The license looks like another get rich quick scheme.
Sorry, its windows only.
HTML and Javascript merge, yet just watch as iexplore gets exploited by more malicious code...
these guys just think they can make a buck making a "better" standard.
Photos.
Client: Great. Now prove to me that your server side logic is the same as the client side.
Programmer: Uh...
Client: Now maintain both for the same price.
Programmer: Uh...
Its probably possible to do this with a little thought but I bet almost none do.
Wake up people, some things are worth repeating. Neat technology that doesn't get attention that it deserves is sometimes worth a second article. Instead of pointing out the obvious, try talking about the technology itself.
Burn Hollywood Burn
The funniest part about this is the fact that about 2 posts above and 2 posts below yours, are two of the comments you linked to! Someone must have searched them out and pasted them here, one even contains the "signature" of the guy who wrote it in the first place, StoneWolf! I guess repeat articles offer great chances to gain some karma.
Or do you have any evidence to back up that claim?
This has already been featured once at /.
4 1&mode=nested
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/06/13352
I imagine my assessment at the time still stands: Using a plugin as the deployment technology could be useful to get a critical mass of developers and libraries, until it becomes semi-standard. However, since I can't recall seeing anything at all related to Curl in these months since the last story, I'd say critical mass is not forthcoming. :(
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
Touting this as being a cross between HTML and Javascript makes me wonder why anyone would want to use it.
Javascript is one of the worst implimentations of a bad idea that I've seen.
One of the basic tenets of client server programming is "Never Trust The Client". Yet still, people write shopping carts that calculate totals and shipping charges in javascript, then trust the client to send back accurate data. I'm sure that TBL knows this, but is he expecting that every curl developer has even taken a basic CS class and will remember that? I doubt it. Developers will look to push as much of the processing as possible off to the client, imposing more security risks. They say they use a 'sandbox' - doesn't VBScript say the same thing?
Also, their micropayment scheme is going to turn a lot of people off. First they say how this has been developed using the same grant as the WWW, (my tax money?) then they explain that if I put up 'curl' code on my site, I've got to pay them per user. Sure. No problem. Next!
Why don't I just put up a page of C++ source and tell people to "lynx -source http://code_url|gcc"?
Sure, whatever...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
plz clik here
I was just about to moderate that "stonewolf" guy up. Thanks for the warning. I guess that's the hip new thing in karma whoring.
Just when you think you can see past the phonies... something new comes up and makes you even more cynical.
How is this viewed generally in terms of Web development. It seems to be something that was designed specifically for this intercompatability. i would like to know what has been compromised in terms of other functionalities for CURL, in order to be all things to all people? Especially since as a plugin, it will be something that people can try and remove quickly if they don't like it. As has been discussed in previous posts there has not been a lot of interest thus far. If it were kickass, it would be a little more popular now 'cause everyone can use it with their existing work on the web, right?
.tv domains specifically restricted to sites in such isolative languages, in order to support TV-appliance technology using the Web and other peripheral economies.
Furthermore, I have always believed that a universal standard is not always a good thing for its own sake. Consider the commercial applications of sites on the Web that are only readable through a particular technology, and translator programs do not capture the full glory of the site. Yes you can translate but it's like dewatermarking a copyrighted music file, it sounds and looks like shit. For visual media on the Net, like maybe sitcoms or whatever that want to broadcast there rather than on TV, it would probably be a good idea to write in a language that's isolated from others commonly used on the Web. I could even see rules that make the
Goat sex free since 2001
After various experiences with client-side yohoo (java, flash, etc. ad nauseistic download and install), I just can't support another client-side app for the Internet. Not to say that these things don't sometimes have their good points, but until workstation computers get a whole lot faster, it just makes a lot more sense to me to deal with things server-side, and even when computing speed increases, I'd expect to see a lot more complexity in what the computer is expected to handle. Unfortunately, this includes the reluctant assumption that, for the next decade or so, windoze is probably going to be the dominant OS for the majority of users, and given their track record, I don't expect clock times to be freed up by increases in hardware. :P
Here's my proposal (the same one I made to my CS prof once upon a time): There are only about a half dozen or so operating systems which spend much time browsing. If we're really going to develop a language that is usable for high-level internet functionality, have it be one which automatically runs make for all these operating systems at once.(Of course, this will require it to be architecture-independant, which will be some fancy juju) Then, when the server gets a request, it sends back the "correct" code for the machine which sent the request. Since it's already compiled, there's no time-wasting disk spinning on somebody's celeron, and the server handles it just like any other request. The page loads as it always would. Sort of like a muscular CGI, I suppose.
Just promise not to flame me too hard
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
"New language CURL ditches all existing web work for a proprietary, windows-only format."
Even shockwave is more cross-platform.
I doubt that anyone will implement this in websites. It's taken five years to get a decent implementation of CSS1, and that's still not used widely.
Got friends?
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Herve
They charge for commercial deployment. On top of that they charge by the 'volume' of curl usage.
Curl was dead before the press release.
Move along folks. Nothing to see here.
CURL is a production based presentation languge, ala PostScript. There is NO way to do anything meaningful to it once it is written, without using a human mind, and maybe not then.
Production languages take that whole little layout/content seperation theory you may have heard of, and ignore it completely. Crap, crap, I say!
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
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!
Moving stuff client side is NOT the way to go. If the client can view images and HTML, make it so the server does the rest.
Making anything reliant on the client is mind numbingly stupid. People are idiots, the more you can do for them, the less they're likely to stuff up.
Hasn't anyone learnt anything?
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
...is being able to read the most insightful comments all in one place.
Curl Instead of Java or JavaScript? posted by michael on Friday April 06, @02:56PM
Re:Java, anyone? (Score:5, Insightful) by Jason Earl (jdearl@yahoo.com)
Some more words... (Score:5, Insightful)by guku on Friday April 06, @03:18PM EST
Commentary (Score:5, Insightful)by Nohea (sd at nohea dot com) on Friday April 06, @03:16PM EST
Curl == Spyware (Score:5, Insightful)by stonewolf on Friday April 06, @03:45PM EST
Much as I like the idea, you are going to have to put the run-time library on every box that runs it, and for every OS we want to browse the net with (eg BeOS, OS/2, Linux, BSD, UN*X, Windoze). Isn't it time we started to sit down and come up with a STANDARD!!!
And until then, stick with Java and HTML?
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
whenever I see the words "plugin" and "browser" I think of the flamewar that started when java was released for the first time... "open door for hackers", phrase one "absolutely secure", phrase two why can't people put programming languages to good use and therefore use them in their appropiate environment? the "web" at last was created with the information-insemination spirit in mind and not the information-computing part of it. *drops 2 bags of copper ore*
They have not even attempted merging my kitchen sink into their elaborate plan. Tsk. Tsk. Why would any self-respecting XML-evangelizing mission-critical component integrator consider using this?
Please. Come back when you have a real solution. (And please do remember to tell me the question.)
Dijkstra Considered Dead
flash was/still is a plugin and i'dsay it's a standard in any modern browser.
Photos.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/06/133524 1&mode=thread
How hard is it to do a search of your own website for "Curl"?
"And like that
Read the license agreement at http://www.curl.com/html/products/surge_license.js p and tell me why I, or anyone else in their right mind would load a plug in that allows the plug in to report on what you have viewed with it and also allows the plug in to block content!
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.
This product looks more like misguided megalomania than like product that stands a chance of actually being used by anyone.
Technically, it acutally looks pretty good. But, the business model and the privacy policy are, well... They're insane.
StoneWolf
From the Curl website:
.. their marketing strategy for selling next-generation CPUs is convincing the client that their CPU can't even /handle/ browsing the net!
Second, by harnessing the vast power of client-side computing. We take advantage of that 90 percent or more of a typical computer user's CPU that's just sitting there idle, itching to get into the Internet game.
Jebus, don't tell Intel
"Old man yells at systemd"
Gap between html and javascript? i didn't there was one.. yet another language to learn.. sigh..
TBL's endorsement of a client-side web language that requires payment per byte seems to me his final sellout. It's bad enough that the W3C costs minimum $5000/year to participate, and that all the new XML standards are too complex for anyone but a large company to implement...but this is ridiculous. He did a great thing inventing the Web and giving it away...but it looks like it's time to move on to new heroes.
You can't study the darkness by flooding it with light. --Edward Abbey
If you read my post, the main objection is that in order to read these languages on machines, you need the runtime libraries for your OS. So while REXX, Perl, CEnvi, 4DOS &c are very useful for your own environment, you would probably object if you had to load a rexx, perl, cenvi, 4dos reader every time you go on the net.
But what you are saying, is that we can have clients for Java, macromedia, Curl, XHTML, and any other fancy language you would like to inflict on us to browse the net.
The net's not like c++, pascal &c, where the distributed form does not rely on everyone having a compiler. For java, macromedia, &c, everyone needs the runtime virtual machine or player. And it is this we should standardise.
Ideally, we could have a virtual software netcomputer, which would run as a separate vm on different hardware. You then write for that in any language you like.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
I am just curious it says it follows current webstandards. How well does it support the web accessiblity initiative?