Early Adopter Curl

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 200 pages
• Published by: Peer Information Inc.
• Edition: 1st Edition September 15, 2001
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1861005970
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1861005977
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Product Description
The Curl Content Language, and the accompanying Surge Lab IDE represent one possible look at the future of web content. A fully object-oriented language, Curl takes the greatest features of HTML, Javascript, DHTML and Java and combines them into a cross-browser, cross-platform technology that's easy to learn and has some serious power behind it. The result of six year's development, Curl is the first language designed specifically to encompass all the problems of building a web application on the client-side and cut away the World Wide Wait we encounter everyday.

As well as providing a tutorial to the Curl language itself, this book also provides a great introduction to its graphics and multimedia capabilities and will give developers everything they need to know to start applying Curl technology in real world situations.

This book covers:

Explains what Curl is and how the web has evolved to need it

Concise introduction to the main features of the Curl content language

Surge Lab IDE for beta 5 and version 1.0

Curl as a replacement for HTML and CSS

Curl as a replacement for other script languages and the DOM

Dynamic page layout and generation of 2-/3-D graphics on the fly

Multimedia support in Curl

XML and the Future beyond v1.0


Publisher Description
This book is for existing web developers, preferably with some knowledge of an object oriented language, who want an overview of the Curl content language and short, sharp information on how to develop Curl applications. This book was written on both the beta 5 and pre-RTM versions of the Surge Lab IDE, and while we can't guarantee that the final version will be identical, you can be sure that all the concepts, examples and explanations will still be valid for the final v1.0 release, scheduled for October 2001.

Reader Reviews
With a book of this nature, it's hard separating an evaluation of the book from an evaluation of the technology itself -- so I won't try too hard. Yes, the book showed certain evidence of haste in editing and proofing but the errors and weaknesses are not of the type to cause an early adopter to stumble. For instance, there is no index but chapters are distinct enough so that it is easy to find the broad categories. I eagerly picked up this book after attending a very impressive demo of Curl's capacities. Only skimming the two chapters on Object Oriented Programming, I concentrated on the other chapters most relevant to GUI developers of Web-based applications. Being an ardent practitioner of the W3C's Cascading Style Sheets technology, I was a bit disappointed in Curl's implementation of styles, which seems clumsy and very limited, even considering the differences in syntax. The authors were very knowledgeable on HTML and CSS issues -- which made their reliance on tables for layout a bit disturbing. Does this indicate that Curl lacks equivalents for CSS positioning and layout properties -- or merely that the authors did not happen to see this as important enough to include in examples? I was dissatisfied with the paucity of examples and the fact that these examples were not of the type of depth to glue the various parts of Curl together. There were some good examples involving 2-D and 3-D graphics which showed the technology to advantage. However, if your primary interest is in form-based Web applications, the examples were sketchy. The book really needs to have context. Criticism of Java, HTML, JavaScript, etc. is not enough. The authors must speak more directly to the questions: {}Does the Web world need another proprietary, Java-like browser plug-in? {}Does the Curl organization have what it takes to go against Microsoft's .NET, which has a similar architecture and revenue model? Answer these questions and you not only have a good book, but a real cool winning tool.