Upping the RIA Ante



January 06, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/web-development/upping-the-ria-ante/212700808

With us today is Richard Treadway, VP of Product Strategy for Curl, which has just announced the release of the Curl Data Kit Data Services (CDK-DS).

Q: Richard, what exactly is the CDK-DS?

A: The CDK-DS is a set of libraries that provide client side support for the Adobe Action Message Format (AMF) protocol, and the open source BlazeDS server. The CDK-DS is an open source project hosted at SourceForge.

Q: What benefit does it bring to developers?

A: The CDK-DS augments Curl's existing libraries of extensive run time support for building Rich Internet Applications. Curl offers a standalone IDE and an Eclipse plug-in that supports creation of complex web based applications.

Q: To put the CDK-DS in context, who do you see as its main competitors?

A: The main competitors for Curl and the CDK-DS are the RIA platforms that support data driven applications. Adobe's Flex and Microsoft's Silverlight are the main competitors in that category. Curl's key differentiators over Flex and Silverlight are performance and security.

Q: In what ways does the CDK-DS enable more robust client-side development?

A: The CDK-DS libraries make it much easier to create end to end high performance solutions that manipulate large enterprise class data sets by supporting the AMF data protocol. Prior to AMF most RIA applications used the XML data protocol. AMF is a high performance data streaming protocol that outperforms XML by an order of magnitude.

Q: How would you define "scalable data connectivity"?

A: Scalable data connectivity means the ability to offer applications that perform even when manipulating large enterprise class data sets that process hundreds of thousands of records. Prior to RIA technologies like Curl, all such processing was done solely on the server. In today's world of web applications robust computing on the client allows applications to scale much more efficiently.

Q: Where can readers go for more information about the CDK-DS?

A: They can start by going to the Curl website. Readers can download the CDK-DS here.

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