The Curl Rich Internet Application (RIA) platform is a part of an emerging group of technologies referred to as “fit clients.”
These technologies are a hybrid of Thick Clients (a.k.a. Fat Clients) and Thin Clients (HTML and RIA). Fit clients embrace the local processing and offline capabilities of Thick Clients while providing tooling normally associated with thin-client web applications. Fit Clients can leverage the processing power and disc space of the client machine, but they can also offer more restrictive and secure environments than client/server platforms.
Using Curl, developers can implement complex, business-critical, Web-based applications that cannot easily be developed with Ajax or other smart client technologies. Curl is often chosen for secure, mission-critical applications that use large data sets and require 3D and 2D rendering, sophisitcated data input and visualization.
