- Welcome and Purpose
- Where We Are Today
- Brief History of Curl
- The Curl Platform
- What We Will Cover
The Curl Platform
As released by Curl Corporation, the Curl technology consists of three elements: the language, the development environment, and the runtime engine.
The MIT engineers called their newly created Web language Curl because of the curly brackets {}, which are a key part of its syntax. The language offers a streamlined integration of text, markup, scripts, and applets, combing the functionality of common Internet technologies in one environment. Furthermore, it supports advanced two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) graphics, XML, event-driven user interaction, and networking. Curl is a fully featured object-oriented programming language, which in July 2001 had over 250 hours of development and displayed an API of approximately 4500 methods.
The development environment has been designed to support the rapid development of Curl applications. It consists of a developer's guide, an API reference manual, a debugger, inspector, console, release tool, source editor, visual layout editor, and smart code completion. The current production release of the IDE is 2.0, and Figure 14 shows what it looks like.
FIGURE 14 Curl IDE.
The client-side plugin or runtime engine, also known as the Surge Software Platform, consists of a flexible, efficient JIT complier, automated versioning, and a platform-independent delivery vehicle.