A small Massachusetts company headed up by some of the best brains at MIT, including Tim Berners-Lee, has released a new Web-building technology it says can replace HTML and Java.
Named after the curly brackets that frame its commands, Curl 1.0 from Curl Corporation has generated more geek buzz than a Palo Alto Starbucks, and it"s easy to understand why. With Curl"s software, websites become faster by a factor of 10 times or more. Additionally, development time on a Curl website is significantly less than sites that use HTML and Java, and is far easier to maintain, the company claims.
Curl"s silver bullet is boosting the speed of browsing and developing websites. Websites that use a single language will provide a significant increase over today"s sites, which utilize a growing number of different software tools such as C++, HTML, Quicktime, Java, Shockwave and Flash and other plug-ins that enable content.
Once a site is up, visitors only need to download a single plug-in called Surge to view the accelerated pages. The plug-in is available free from Curl"s site. The plug-in is currently available only for Microsoft Windows PCs. Versions for Mac OS X and Linux are being developed.
A second speed gain is found at the CPU. The Surge plug-in ingeniously uses the CPU to process pages built with Curl for page redraws, graphics processing, database duties and other tasks. In current technology, these bandwidth-hogging duties rely on distant servers and are constrained by the speed of the user"s Net connection.