Enterprise Curl

Book excerpt: Enterprise Curl is an advanced level handbook aimed at developing a full-featured enterprise application written in Curl for experienced web developers, system architects, and project managers. Unlike other Curl books, this will not be a beginner's introduction to the Curl language, or to distributed application architecture and development, as those topics are covered in detail elsewhere by other authors and journals. Instead, Enterprise Curl is built around the creation of a feature-rich eCommerce application in Curl, and each chapter will build on the previous resulting in a fully functional system. What is Curl? Curl is a fully object-oriented language that takes the best features of Java, HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, and Perl, and combines them into a cross-platform cross-browser language that's easy-to-learn yet quite powerful. Curl began in development at MIT in 1995, when they were awarded a government DARPA grant to "develop the next generation of communication and computation software." In the 8 months that Curl has been commercially available, over 170,000 people have downloaded the development platform.