ColdFusion Developer in Australia

A few days ago I was on a call with some sales people from Curl who were pitching us on their platform. I've sat on this a while because I wanted a chance to fully look into it and give it a fair shake. Having said and done that, I can say that I am not impressed.

One of the first points that the sales person made was something to the effect of "We're huge in Japan." That's all well and good, but the RIA market is much more than Japan. They claim to have been enabling RIA development since 1998. Not quite as long as Flash, but still not a new kid on the block either. OK, so far not too bad... Then someone stuck their foot in their mouth: The one thing that the sales person did that really pissed me off was basing their pitch on disparaging other technologies (Sliverlight and Flex). They claimed that Silverlight was "too late to the RIA party." Hello? Pot meet kettle? You may be big in Japan, but when it comes to mindshare amongst RIA developers, you're just as late, if not later than Microsoft to this party. At one point I had to stop these fellows and ask them to focus the discussion on what they can do, not what others can't do. Let's just say this isn't the best way to introduce me to your platform.

Seeing as this was going nowhere fast, I decided to look into it a bit more myself. Well, it turns out that to develop in Curl you need to learn yet another language. It looks a little like VB, a little like Java, but not totally. It's OO like AS3, but it's also got some elements to it that AS3 doesn't have yet (native 3D). This could be good or bad, take it for what it's worth.

If you want to get to remote data, you're pretty limited to web services or straight up XML. One of the not-so-hidden secrets to Flex's success is the binary remoting you get from AMF. This has really been a home run from the get go and we, as Flex developers, often overlook how valuable this can be in developing RIA apps. The lack of any kind of binary transfer is a major turn off, at least for me. Web services are bloated at best and useless at worst. If they want to improve this, the need to look at implementing AMF (open spec) or Hessian for some time of binary remoting.

I really think that the guys at Curl probbly mean well and have put a lot of good time and effort into their product. I just can't get myself over the image I have in my head of it being a scrappy MIT project that someone threw some VC at and tried to make it viable as a product. Really and truly, they are fighting an uphill battle against Adobe and Microsoft (same could have been said for a little company called Allaire a decade ago) with not much hope of breaking through the "big two" of RIA development. It's a good effort at an RIA platform, but in my opinion, not much more. Don't just take my word for it though: go to their site, take a look yourself, and form your own opinion.