Jonathan Wolfe, a longtime front-end developer, sent me this comment to post: I've been usging HAML for over a year now, and would rather not do frontend development at all than have to switch back to RHTML or some other templating language for the frontend. The people posting comments that a tool like HAML becomes less useful as a layout gets more complex have it precisely backwards. »

Hi Martin, I recently read your article titled "Flex, JavaFX, or Silverlight?" and wanted to let you know about another developer platform that fills in many of the gaps in functionality and security that the others you mentioned create. Curl has over 300 customers, and 40 partners worldwide, and is designed to easily manage large data sets, with enterprise-class security, and on and off-line capabilities. Curl is no newcomer to the RIA game and was originally founded out of research done at MIT in 1998. The company recently re-launched into North America after great success with many Asian companies like Toyota, Panasonic and Hitachi. Curl's ability to provide offline access to data, enterprise-class security and functionality in various other areas that other developer platforms fail to address make it a powerful alternative for developing rich internet applications. Please let me know if you have any questions about Curl or would like to speak with a member of our executive team to learn more about the Curl platform and its relaunch into North America. Thanks, Jamie -for Curl, Inc. Jameson Bull | Associate Account Representative Lois Paul & Partners | www.loispaul.com P 781.782.5788 | Jameson_Bull@lpp.com C 203.417.1177 »

Hi Martin, I enjoyed your recent column where you begin to explore the three choices facing developers looking to move into the RIA space. I am currently working as a contractor for the Navy, involved with developing sonar tactical decision aids. In the last couple of years we have started migrating our large C++/Motif based system to a Java GUI front end with a SOA backend. We run on Redhat with some pretty high performance PC hardware to do simulations. The Navy as a whole seems to be moving to a more browser based system to view and interact with information, we have received very positive feedback for our work that exposes web service functionality via a browser. We spend an enormous amount of effort in terms of software installation and the ability to just point a browser at a server simplifies things considerably. We do fairly significant graphing and data visualization that requires interactive user input beyond simple data grid controls and we haven't felt that the current Ajax/DHTML/CSS model was robust enough to warrant exploring. Java's applet solution is broken, and we don't have the time or manpower to roll our own approach. From our point of view, Flex seems to be a strong contender due to the cross-platform nature of the technology, its relative maturity compared to the other technologies, and the ease that Flex Data Services appears to integrate with our current backend. One thing to consider is that to deploy Flex Data Services on more than 1 CPU requires a fairly expensive license, but that kind of issue if above my pay grade :) Military IT systems share many things in common with their enterprise brethern, however they also add significant requirements with respect to large scale simulation and data visualization. Anyways I look forward to reading what you discover in your exploration of these exciting new technologies. Pedro Estrada High Rez Consulting Arlington, VA »