back to article Curl goes outside browser for Silverlight fight

Microsoft's Silverlight 3.0 is still in beta and it promises major improvements, but the competition is already promising greater power. The Novell-backed open-source implementation of Silverlight this week announced a preview of its second version. Moonlight 2.0 is based on Silverlight 2.0, but it now includes significant …

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  1. Matt

    CURL

    is a nice product, but I can't see why you'd choose it over AJAX, not on the basis of speed anyway. I've done a number of AJAX projects and the performance is very good.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    browser wars

    "RIAs have naturally attracted concern because they give PC users another opportunity to download and install potentially malicious code on their desktops."

    The only reason RIAs exist is down to MS's stubborn insistence on keeping it's browser technology in the 90s.

    Healthy standards (which are followed) would have brought us to HTML 5 much quicker and it's new features such as canvas and chromeless windows, would have satified the RIA need.

  3. gribbler

    Oh the joys of never ending competition...

    You have to love free market competition. How else would we end up with 10,345,765 (estimated) different standards for RIA's, not to mention all the damned browsers and OS's that they have to run on.

    I'm fed up of all this damned choice. Can't some huge global corporation just buy them all out and standardise the whole damned thing? Oh wait, M$ tried that and landed a pile of antitrust cases at the same time as forgetting how to build anything useful.

    Oh well, maybe Google can take the reins and return us to a standardised, autocratic dictatorship.

  4. A J Stiles
    Paris Hilton

    curl?

    Isn't that a library / cli app for downloading, which forms the basis of more than one package management system? Or am I thinking of something else?

  5. Unlimited

    Curl Who?

    "Founded in 1988"

    Why have I never heard of them?

    "Curl has over 400 customers"

    Oh I see. That's why.

    http://www.curl.com/company.php

    Looks like they only support Firefox up to v1.5?

    Good luck with that.

    http://www.curl.com/products/rte/system.php

    I wonder how many people have the RTE installed.

    I don't, clicking on their demo link prompts me to download their file.

    http://www.curl.com/demos/cbi/COM.CURL.CBI/start.curl

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    Thin clients?

    For to be laughink. The nineties are back. Lotus Notes in a new bottle. Go away please, we need you as much as we need influenza A...

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    heh? cURL

    Is this associated with curl? It gets very confusing when they start to use the same names, like chrome and firefox.

    Oddly cURL is at version 7 as well.

  8. Stewart McKenna
    Thumb Down

    Curl

    The fact that curl supports FTP, Telnet and has an option to us .netrc files for user accounts

    and passwords speaks volumes about their commitment to 'security'

  9. raving angry loony

    bugger off

    At this point there is still no fucking way Silverlight/Mono is going to make it onto any systems under my control. Microsoft can go hang. I'd rather do without whatever idiot provider decides to only use Silverlight.

    Lack of security, intrusive patent issues, and Microsoft's desire and ability to use their "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics over the years has given me a healthy respect for the potential damage and danger of any product created by that company. Far as I'm concerned, there should be a concerted effort to REDUCE the dependence on that company rather than allowing it a foothold in yet another domain.

  10. Duke Briscoe

    misconceptions of "Curl Who?"

    Curl the language existed before cURL the tool, but yeah that does lead to some confusion occasionally. Any cURL security problems have nothing to do with Curl, which has a good security model for making it safe to load applets from unknown developers.

    "Curl Who?" has a couple of mistakes and misconceptions. Curl was founded in 1998, spun out of MIT, as the article says, not 1988.

    The current Curl 7.0 system requirements are at http://www.curl.com/download/rte/system.php , and include all current browser versions of IE up to 8.0, Firefox up to 3.0, Chrome 1.0 on Windows. Most browsers on Mac and Linux too, I really can't think of any browsers that have any major problems with Curl. The system requirements linked to by "Unlimited" were for an old version , Curl 5.0. The browser independence is one advantage of a plugin. Plus you can have the Curl applets installed and run outside of any browser, on your desktop.

    400 customers in the sense of large Asian corporations and government agencies, not end users. So the number of end users is not quite so tiny. Curl is being used in a corporate environment for applications more demanding than what most of the other RIA tools are being used for, and not currently much for mass markets. It is not such a big deal for users of high value applications to do the one minute plugin installation.

    "Unlimited" got prompted to download the Curl applet file because they ignored the line above the demo that said you needed the plugin installed, and also there is a further level of plugin detection that should have warned you again that you needed the plugin when you clicked on the link to the demo, but your browser might have a security setting that blocks the HTML page scripting that does the Curl plugin detection.

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