Curl announced it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, a not-for-profit, member-supported corporation that helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. In conjunction with joining the Foundation as an Add-In Member, Curl released details of its plans to base the next phase of its enterprise Rich Internet Application (RIA) development tools on the Eclipse framework.

Today’s programmers expect to do much of their programming in an integrated development environment (IDE) without having to jump around to unrelated and disconnected tools. Curl understands the developer’s need for an ecosystem of tools with a common interface and behavior. In response to this need, the company is developing a set of plugins for Eclipse that over time will replace all of the current Curl development tools.

“Eclipse is no longer limited to the Java programming language. It is a universal IDE for any language platform, as the implementation of the Curl IDE in Eclipse demonstrates,” said Bert Halstead, chief architect, Curl. “Curl is the most powerful RIA platform for the enterprise, and Eclipse is the best general-purpose IDE available today – the combination is unbeatable.”

As part of its Eclipse strategy, Curl will replace the current Curl IDE, a full-featured development environment, with a new one based on the Eclipse framework. This will include a set of plugins called the Curl Development Tools for Eclipse (CDE). The current IDE, renamed as the Curl Classic IDE, will coexist with the CDE through at least the first release of the new tool. With the creation of the CDE, Curl is reiterating its commitment to providing state of the art program productivity tools that showcase the ease of programming in Curl.

The first CDE release will include all the functionality of the Curl Classic IDE, including the Curl language sensitive editor, debugger, search, deployment capabilities, Visual Layout Editor and much more. Future releases of the CDE will integrate the Curl Visual Layout Editor into the Eclipse framework as a Design Perspective, and substantially improve other programming productivity features such as error highlighting in the source-code editor, language sensitive navigation, refactoring and code assistance.

“We are delighted that Curl has joined the Eclipse Foundation,” said Mike Milinkovich, director, Eclipse Foundation. “The Curl RIA platform is a valuable addition to the Eclipse ecosystem and will further broaden our programming language support beyond Java. Curl’s support for Eclipse gives developers in our ecosystem a powerful platform for enterprise RIA development, which is growing in importance and prominence. We look forward to the company’s contributions to the Eclipse community.”

For more information on Curl, contact Jameson Bull Jameson_Bull@lpp.com at Lois Pau l& Partners.