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Curl Re-launches Enterprise Rich Internet Application Platform in North America

New purpose-built platform supports building highly complex Web-based enterprise applications

San Francisco — April 16, 2007 — At Web 2.0 Expo, Curl®, Inc. today announced its re-launch into North America with the release of Version 5.0 of the Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform.  With Curl, developers can implement a new class of enterprise-grade, complex Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with other RIA technologies. Additionally, corporations with legacy client-server applications can move to Web-based delivery, increasing reach and reducing cost.
 
With many pundits predicting a rapid acceleration in the deployment of service oriented architectures (SOA), there is a need to support those SOA-based applications with a sophisticated, rich graphic user experience. Unlike other RIA technologies, Curl enables the enterprise-class capabilities that these applications require, including highly complex user interfaces, large data sets, on-line and off-line usage, high performance and security. Curl has been proven in large, complex RIA deployments in the U.S. and Asia with adoption by more than 300 customers such as Toyota, Panasonic and Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi, as well as more than 45 partners including NTT Data and Hitachi Software Engineering Co., Ltd.  As a result, the company is well-positioned to help enterprises Web-enable their most business-critical applications. 

One U.S.-based company successfully using Curl’s RIA platform is Paisley, a leading provider of governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software solutions. Paisley turned to Curl to enable features such as graphical dashboards, conditional formatting and spreadsheet-like desktops. Through the use of Curl, Paisley enables a rich reporting experience as a standard feature of its industry leading Enterprise GRC™ and GRC on Demand™ solutions and has also eliminated the dependence on third-party reporting tools.

“Access to data and a rich, end-user reporting experience are very important in utilizing a governance, risk and compliance solution,” said Tim Welu, CEO, Paisley.  “Using Curl, Paisley's Enterprise GRC and SaaS-based GRC on Demand solutions offer a high-performance, sophisticated reporting capability that clearly differentiates our GRC product offerings.”

Curl’s industrial strength platform consists of all the components required to Web-enable client-server, SOA-based applications, including:

• Curl Language – Designed specifically for use on the Web, the Curl language is a full-featured, object-oriented programming language that integrates rich text formatting, GUI layout and presentation scripting.
• Curl Run Time Environment – The RTE is the execution platform for the Curl language and includes an extensive collection of built-in APIs.  It is invoked when loading a Curl application into the browser.
• Curl Integrated Development Environment – The IDE includes tools for developing and debugging Curl applications and includes Visual Layout Editor and numerous code examples to get users started quickly.

Key features of Version 5.0 of the Curl platform include:

• New Controls – Controls including TabAccordion, GroupBox, SpinControl, CalendarControl, ProgressBar and Slider round out the set of built-in controls to include all commonly used user interface components.
• Visual Layout Editor (VLE) Additions – Drag-and-drop editing capabilities have expanded to include menus, charts, and diagrams in addition to the previously supported basic set of containers and controls.  The VLE object palette can also be extended to include user-defined compound objects composed of simpler VLE objects.
• More Powerful IDE – The Curl development environment has gained several new tools useful for enterprise-scale software development including a profiler tool for analyzing application performance, a monitoring tool for observing HTTP traffic and a direct interface from the IDE to source-code control systems.  The Curl documentation set, already notable for its interactive, user-editable code examples, has gained new navigation and search capabilities such as full-text search.

“Many enterprises are dissatisfied with the high cost of ownership and limited reach of their current client-server applications,” said Jnan Dash, chief strategy officer, Curl. “We realized this market gap and provide a scalable platform that supports a rich user experience and easily integrates into the enterprise.”

“There is a need for Rich Internet Application platforms that provide much higher performance than is currently available today,” said Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst, Burton Group. “The ability to support extremely large data sets, rapid graphics rendering and extensive off-line capabilities at the client level is very attractive to some organizations.”

Curl Version 5.0 is generally available and can be downloaded at www.curl.com. Development and deployment of Curl applications is free for personal use, and pricing for commercial deployments starts at $12,000.  Curl’s pricing structure is specifically designed to accommodate enterprise, Internet, software-as-a-service and OEM business models.

Curl was founded in 1998 on the basis of research conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  The company’s first product was released in 2002 and was specifically designed for complex Web interfaces.  In 2004, Curl was acquired by Japanese-based Sumisho Computer Systems, which focused the company primarily in the Asian market in reaction to demand for richer application interfaces in that region.

The Curl platform will be demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Expo in booth #207, and executives will be available to discuss the Curl RIA solution in more detail. 

About Curl, Inc.