Hi BlackBox people,
I came accross the following article in the British Guardian newspaper a
while back. It sums up the (somewhat propagandist) benefits of the new
language Curl. There are however a number of strong points which might be
relevant for the future direction of BlackBox, particularly the notion of
plugging-in Surge (see below). It struck me that something very simular
should be possible with BlackBox. Please read it, I'll add some further
comment at the end.
If you fancy a challenge, think about making the web redundant. Think about
getting all the programmers and designers who create web pages in HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language) to use something different. Think about
converting them to Curl. It sounds like a long shot, but it is by no means
impossible. The information technology industry is used to sweeping changes,
such as the move from Microsoft's MS- DOS to Windows, or from proprietary
networking systems to the internet's IP (Internet Protocol). Curl does have
a couple of advantages, according to the company's co-founder, chairman and
chief executive officer, Bob Young. lt comes out of the Massachusetts
Institute of Teanology(MIT), where the World Wide Web Consortium is based,
and it has the backing of Berners-Lee, the web's inventor and W3C's founder,
who is also an advisor to Curl. The problem with the web is that it is great
for looking at things, but generally poor at doing things. Curl's idea is to
provide the functionality of desktop PC applications inside a browser. This
becomes possible if you create sites using the Curl content language instead
of HTML. The drawback is that to view them, users have to download Surge,
which enables the browser to run Curl programs. Young says. "Users have to
get the plug-in, just as they do if you throw some Flash on your site. Surge
is about five megabytes to download, which is about the same size as an MP3
file, so it's like downloading a song. So as with Flash, you'll be asked if
you want the regular site or the enhanced site. The difference is that with
Flash, the site is generally not functionally any better, but with Curl, it
is." The intranet is where Curl is being targeted now. The first application
has just gone live at Siemens, BT is starting to use it, and Curl has just
opened a UK office to sell to companies. Users can download Surge from
Curl's website (www.curl.com), free, but companies with internal networks
can use it today, for a price. The question is, why would they want to?
Young says Curl's big advantage is that it brings together the functionality
of disparate web technologies including HTMI, a scripting language, and
Java-like programming capabilities. 'Everybody thought the web would get
better, hut it is integration that is really the key' says Young. Curl is
efficient, because once the user has the plug-in, only small pieces of code
need to be sent over the web: "a small amount of code delivers a large
amount of functionality." Young argues that this is an advantage
particularly in places such as the UK, "because of the lack of high-speed
internet availability".
Curl also makes much better use of the world's computer power. At the
moment, Voung says, the web is complicated by the fact that in the US, the
computation for 150 million PCs is being done on 10-15million servers. "It
is an unstable situation. It is an enormously inefficient way to handle
computation" Push the computation out to the PCs, as Curl does, and you
increase the power of the web 'by an order of magnitude overnight'.
This is, I point out, exactly what Microsoft's Bill Gates was saying in his
keynote speech at the opening of the Comdex computer exhibition last
November. "Everybody is saying it," Young replies. "The whole idea of the
web being replaced by distributed executables, most people think that's the
way the web is going to go. There isn't a way of delivering it with the full
range of functionality that we have, except Curl." There could be
alternatives, ofcourse, such as Sun Microsystems' Java, and Microsoft's
emerging .Net strategy. But Java has failed on the desktop and .Net doesn't
exist yet. Either way, Young claims Curl is not out to replace these rival
technologies: it complements them. The latter half of the 90s saw an
attempted counter revolution led by people sell- ing large servers and large
databases to run on them - Sun's Scott McNealy and Oraele's Larry Ellison.
The need for large hosts has not gone away, hut the tide has turned, and
there is now more interest in distributed computation and peer-to-peer
systems (Napster, Aimster, KaZaA and so on). Curl may not be the software
architecture for the future web, hut it is heading in the right direction.
What strikes me that Curl is clearly positioned to address some of the
(apparent?) shortcomings in current web development.
Probably in principle very simular things are possible with BlackBox, and
probably BlackBox is even much stronger. But inherent technological strength
is not the same as positioning. To put it bluntly (if you will excuse me) it
is af if BlackBox almost deliberately tries not to sell itself. Sure there
was something almost hidden in BlackBox 1.4 that you could create web pages,
but that cannot be your answer to the internet challenge! Looking at it from
the perspective of a not too technical person, if I want to develop an
internet application I'm overwhelmed with all kinds of technologies (SOAP,
CGI etc. etc.). Simply put I do not really want to know (or as little as
possible) and only then the more functional stuff (e.g. XML). I want to be
able to plug in the Black Box framework in my Browser (transparently) and
let the framework sort out all the communication middleware shit with the
server, especially if I can run a BlackBox framework there as well. I'd like
to have a 4GL modelling layer (UML 2 ?) on top off BlackBox so I do not have
to program every field check.
At present BlackBox seems (to my limited perceptions) almost excessively
focussed in doing very complicated things with view objects within view
objects and such like. But such simple things as fetching a web page took me
weeks to figure out and only then because luckily someone in the BlackBox
community had written a subsystem.
I doubt Curl is the exact way to go for BlackBox (I'm not even sure it is
all that brilliant). But to repeat they at least have a clear and up to date
positioning for the internet (i.e. they have a story) and it would appear
that they make a lot of stuff very transparent and easy for the end user.
The publisher Wrox has just put out a well written, easy to understand early
adopter book on Curl. All that sort of thing would help BlackBox immensely
as well. I understand too all that may be a tall order for a small company
like Oberon Microsystems. But why not invoke the help of the BlackBox
community to do some ot that (Professor Warford's tutorial for example could
easily be expanded to become a proper primer for BlackBox).
To end on a radical note. My job over the last 5 years has been to position
all kinds of software tools with top companies in Holland at a conceptual
level. If nothing else I have learned that technological superiority (yes
I'm still in awe of the BlackBox concept) is not the main issue. It's how
easy, fast, simple and cheap it is to meet the main challenges of the day
and how powerful one can present that picture. From that angle it is not at
all obvious what makes BlackBox so much better than other products on the
market, in fact it seems to lag behind and comes accross as a technological
marvel of the world of 10 years ago (that's an eon in computer time).
Respectfully my view is that BlackBox should be completely respositioned.
I'm sure many of us in the BlackBox community would be glad to provide
input.
Regards
> ____________________________________
> Bart van Wijck
> Senior Business Development Consultant
> Compuware BV
> Telefoon: 020 311 88 57
> Fax : 020 311 88 01
> Mobiel : 06 54 35 23 76
>
>
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Received on Thu Jan 03 2002 - 11:44:52 UTC
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: Thu Sep 26 2013 - 06:27:46 UTC