Curl International to merge with Sumisho (SCS)

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International, their wholly owned Tokyo-based subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl International was formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

Curl Corporation in the USA will not be affected.
In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment - either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.

RIA Plugins: Curl Surge versus Adobe LiveScript/Flash/Apollo

This is just an IOU

If LiveScript/Flash is thought to be the answer for a browser-based commercial software project, then surely Curl must have been considered and eliminated. Likely not.

If a captive audience of cubicle domiciled users is to use plugin-Y, then there is at least a plugin-Z that merits consideration: the Surge plugin.

The Curl case is two-fold for RIA: the 'gentle slope' and the 'one-language-mastery' versus journeymen of many languages and apprentices in more.