Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

A young company named Curl is looking to the OS/400 platform as a fertile market for its user interface technology. The company, which sells development tools for creating so-called "rich client" interfaces, says the time has come for regaining the functionality lost when developers moved from client/server architectures to Web browser interfaces. Considering that thousands of green-screen RPG applications were never upgraded to client/server in the first place, Curl hopes to help OS/400 developers leapfrog interface trends while preserving the RPG investment.

Curl is one of a growing number of software companies playing in the market for rich-client development technologies. In a nutshell, Curl is a programming language and a just-in-time run-time environment that allows developers to build dynamic event- and data-driven client interfaces--the type of feature-rich but hard-to-administer "fat client" interfaces associated with the client/server architecture--and run them in Web browsers.

The Curl language is similar in some ways to other graphical development languages, like Java, C++, C#, or Flash Action Script, but it offers several advantages, particularly in the area of code duplication, inheritance, and support for macros, according to the company. The key benefit offered by Curl-developed interfaces is an extremely fast response time. Because the application executes almost entirely on the PC, it is not dependent on network bandwidth constraints or servers, and is an ideal solution for occasionally connected mobile workers, as well as migration of legacy applications, Curls says.

Chris Lesar, the company's senior director of business development, describes Curl technology, using an example from his days at SSA (now SSA Global Technologies), when the company started moving BPCS from a client/server architecture to a host/browser architecture.

"In the client/server days, when you clicked on one cell, it affected another cell. We pushed that to the Web, and it choked," Lesar said. "With Curl, we take that fat-client functionality and allow it to be deployed and delivered over the Web. We give you the low total cost of ownership that the Web promised and provide you the feature richness that you lost when you went to the Web."

Curl was originally created at MIT as a class project for the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Twelve students and scientists involved in the project, led by computer scientist Stephen Ward, Michael Dertouzos (the late director of the MIT computer science lab), and Timothy Berners-Lee (the creator of the Web), founded Curl in 1998 to commercialize the technology they had developed. Today, Curl maintains its MIT roots with its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where about 60 people are employed. The privately held company just completed an $18 million round of financing, and in 2003 it expects to see increased adoption of its product, which was first released in the fall of 2001.

Curl's applications are as wide and varied as the ways in which humans interface with computers. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas Microsoft chairman Bill Gates showcased a new "smart" watch called the M9 Personal Sailing Instrument made by Finnish watch manufacturer Suunto. The watch packs a global positioning system (GPS), barometer, thermometer, and 3-D compass, and it is able to store a large number of GPS waypoints and routes and to exchange them with a PC. Suunto used Curl to develop the PC-side, browser-based software that allows sailors to manipulate nautical charts, plot new routes, and connect to the Web to download updated charts and collaborate with the land lubbers back home. Curl is also in talks with a Japanese video game maker to develop new interfaces for old video games.

But Curl isn't setting its sights solely on developing futuristic Dick Tracy watches and giving Pac-Man new life. Company officials see a broad market developing for its technology in the business application space, as well. To date, the company has had several engagements in this space, including a German insurance agent management application, for which Curl was used to develop a new forms-driven interface. Curl was also called in to develop a new "dashboard" for a North American software company's asset management application. Dashboard applications, where business metrics are displayed graphically using dials and gauges--such as those you see on the instrument panel of your car--are a popular use of Curl, Lesar says. "[That] seems to get people revved up," he says.

For the OS/400 platform, Lesar sees potential for creating OEM relationships with independent software vendors and for selling Curl licenses independently to some of the larger OS/400 shops. Particular application areas that would have the most to gain from Curl's rich-client technology include business intelligence, sales force automation, network and systems management, and ERP packages in general, Lesar says. Because the Curl technology itself is platform-independent, it doesn't matter what operating system the host server is running; Curl supports AS/400 and iSeries hosts, as well hosts running Windows, Linux, mainframe, or FreeBSD.

The potential for Curl on the OS/400 platform would not be so great if not for the presence of Lesar and senior vice president of marketing Robert Hoyt, both of whom had stints at SSA and know and appreciate the unique properties and peculiar situation of the OS/400 platform. Both have watched the steps that IBM has taken to push users and vendors to modernize their RPG applications and their green-screen interfaces, such as the old "interactive tax" that segued into the enterprise and standard versions of OS/400. "IBM wants to keep them on the box," Lesar points out. "We offer one way of doing that."

Lesar is fond of calling Curl a "preservative for the AS/400," but somebody else gets credit for coining that phrase. The phrase was first uttered when Curl officials briefed AMR Research analyst Bruce Richardson on the Curl technology. After Curl was done with its description, Richardson's first reaction was to say, "This is a preservative for the AS/400," according to Lesar. Richardson also used the phrase in a February 28 AMR Alert on Curl.

Last week, Curl announced support for Linux, for both the development environment and the runtime environment. Curl offers a Curl Starter Kit for $25,000 that includes enough software and training to develop a prototype Curl application. For more information on the company and the product, go to www.curl.com.