The Future of Curl

Over at Curl I have added some comments to an invitation by Richard Monson-Haefel to weigh-in on improving Curl.

Divining the future of Curl means thinking outside the box. Here's a few attempts.

Pair up Curl as a client-side to Gemstone as has been done by Seaside.

Beef-up Curl on the client-side by getting serious about the future of expression-based languages: if there is not room in the marketplace for ICON, UNICON, REBOL and Curl then look to partner with the remnant of the ICON team at U. of Arizona.

If the Curl team cannot partner-up, then look to go beyond one of those languages by having more effective goal-oriented programming than UNICON or more user-friendly parsing than REBOL.

The option of viewing Curl as a platform and not a language seems to close off many avenues unless Curl, the platform, is able to embrace languages such as ICON which appear to be in need of a new home.

Or is there a niche for Curl in the future of Perl with Parrot, or Ruby with an industrial-quality VM, or distributed OZ?

One interesting place to look is GROK and what they are looking to do with Python ZOPE. That project alone might ensure the future of ZOPE.

Then there is RDF. Somehow RDF has become tied to clunky XML implementations or worse. Even now that W3C has embraced "sparkle" for RDF Data Access, we need not ignore the prospects for Curl as a potentially RDF-friendly language. Prima facie, ICON back-tracking and REBOL paths make either look more promising as a language. But Curl, the platform, could be a powerful starting point for a more language-neutral approach to RDF triples. Mozilla XUL has moved away from RDF (blame XML there, where the 'X' is for 'Xtra-heavy' rather than eXtensible.) The real-issue is how to effectively provide metadata. As more people look to HTML and XHTML itself as the answer, Curl appears to be a natural: Curl has always been metadata-friendly.

Curl CSPD could even be used to help ensure that meta-data that would disclose too much would be suppressed where privacy is an issue (think blogging in China and i-journalism most anywhere.)

Cool Curl 'live' code widget

Over at eclectic-pencil I have a post on a very cool Curl widget that rivals almost anything I have ever seen expand and collapse on a web page.

What I neglect to mention is that in the example, the only code to create the XMl tree is this:

   let xmldoc:XDMDocument =
{build-xml preserve-whitespace? = false, loc}
|| ...
{XDMTreeControl open? = true, xmldoc.root}

Which you would be hard-pressed to beat in Seaside for Smalltalk or in Groovy. Concise.

TiScript also has an alternative DOM and some nice features as a JavaScript alternative, but Curl 5.0 is a mature, full RIA product with 'live' code for inspection and a focus on the client-side. It is almost Smalltalk but it was also built for the web (in fairness, Curl goes about as far back as Smalltalk VisualWave.)

The only cool but alive technologies as neglected as Curl 5.0 must be Gemstone/S and Rebol 2.6.3 ... and the latter is soon to be 2.7.x with 3.0 in the wings ...

Watch for a Seaside for Gemstone/S beta in the news soon ...

PS For people living on AIR and FLASH, Rebol/FLASH went 2.0 today ...