Curl Developer Community Blog

Why is an Enterprise RIA Platform different? Simple: it must handle the demands of enterprise class applications. Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that a web application must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records.

Based on Curl's experience with large enterprise deployments at companies such as Panasonic, Toyota and Sony we find enterprise demands are focused in the following areas:

• Large datasets that demand high client-side performance;
• Complicated operations that require superior user interface design;
• Data visualization that requires high performance client-side graphics;
• Large scale deployments with thousands of users worldwide that require performance that scales;
• Complex applications that demand a development environment that scales to hundreds of thousands of lines of code.
  

Large Datasets
Enterprise applications routinely require interaction with very large data sets. This means that a RIA platform must be optimized to deliver high response times even when data sets approach 100,000+ records. In an independent study Curl has proven to be 70% faster than Adobe Flex when loading large data sets.

Nippon Sheet Glass Co. is an example of the need for high performance. Nippon Sheet Glass is a leading provider of industrial glass products. The pricing and configuration of these glass products is highly complex. Their Curl application handles as many as 99 different pricing scenarios with various sizes and patterns and large data sets with up to 5000 transactions with up to 10,000 items per transaction.

Superior User Interface Design
The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and the iPhone experience have shown that great user interface design makes a big difference. Now more than ever enterprises are realizing that user interface design can reap great returns though process improvement and employee productivity.

Using Curl a large electronics manufacturer was able reduce procurement times for their video cameras by 5 days which amounted to a huge savings. This was possible by making previously serial processes asynchronous demanding superior user interfaces to handle that complexity intuitively.

DataVisualization
Many enterprise applications drive timely decisions through the use of effective data visualization of complex data. This often requires high performance rendering of complex objects.  Curl uses the native graphics capability of the client hardware for maximum performance. You can see first hand by trying one of our demo applications that does real-time ray-tracing.

Paisley has become a recognized market leader in the fast-growing governance, risk and compliance (GRC) sector by offering clearly superior solutions. Quality, analytics and reporting are most important in choosing a governance, risk and compliance solution. Using Curl, Paisley’s solution offers a high-performance, sophisticated reporting capability that clearly differentiates their offering. You can read the complete case study here.

Large Scale Deployments
Enterprise RIA deployments must scale to service thousands of users. With Curl much of the application processing occurs on the client which means that the server loads are much lower as the number of users increases. In many Curl enterprise deployments only a single server is required even as the application is delivered to thousands of users.

This is the case with Panasonic’s Voice of the Engineer (VOE) Curl application. The VOE application provides comprehensive support data on Panasonic’s products for their support engineers as they help customers with product problems. The application is used by all Panasonic engineers in Japan and will soon expand to worldwide use.

Complex Applications
Many enterprise applications must deal with complex business logic, many functional elements and large numbers of screens. These complex applications often require hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The complexity of such applications can easily overwhelm development efforts using simple AJAX tools.

The Curl language combines the descriptive and active elements found in traditional web-development tools with the strength of a full-featured object-oriented programming language. The language spans the full range of requirements, from simple text markup and GUI layout to heavy-duty object-oriented computing. This means more capability is provided with fewer lines of code lowering development and maintenance costs.