Just when you thought there were enough rich Internet application (RIA) platforms and runtimes on the market (Adobe's Flex, Microsoft's Silverlight, Sun's JavaFX, etc.), another one turns up claiming to solve a problem the other ones don't. In the case of the one I found at Web 2.0 Expo, the company is Curl and the unique selling proposition of its RIA platform, according to chief architect Bert Halstead in the audio interview below, is that it outperforms the others, particularly in enterprise situations.Here at Web 2.0 Expo (co-located with Interop at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City), I had a chance to catch up with Halstead just as the show was coming to a close. In the podcast interview (download it here or use the podcast player below to stream it to your desktop), Halstead claimed that when it comes to serious number crunching and data visualization with RIAs, that Curl's solutions can run circles around the competing runtimes from Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun.

According to Halstead, Adobe's Flex and Microsoft's Silverlight are perfect for certain applications that aren't performance intensive, particularly consumer-targeted RIAs on public Web sites. But, behind the firewall where enterprises might want to deliver the real-time charting capability of something like Excel, but into a browser instead (potentially reducing the total cost of ownership on the desktop side), Curl believes its solution (which, like the others, requires a browser plug-in) is the only option when productivity depends on performance.

Said Halstead in the interview (@ 1:02):

Clearly, there are a lot of applications where the performance requirements aren't that heavy and any technology can do it. But if you have an application where you have some custom data analysis that that application needs to do ... so even the inner loop of the application is written in your application language, then, a high-performance platform matters. And, in situations like that, we've seen Curl be an order of magnitude faster than Flex 3, for example.

One challenge for Curl though is that it's swimming upstream (as is Silverlight) against Adobe's footprint. What desktop, for example, can't already support an Adobe-based RIA because of how many Web sites out on the Web require Adobe's runtime (the same can be said of Adobe's PDF and Sun's Java, but not of Microsoft's Silverlight)? Halstead agreed that global footprint is one of Adobe's key advantages in the RIA market, but that where Curl is playing, in the enterprise, most companies are OK with adding an additional runtime to the corporate desktops once they see the benefits.

Another challenge for Curl (one that, if you ask me, isn't fully licked by the other players yet either) is on the mobile front where, based on their consumer experience, platforms like the iPhone have reset expectations of the mobile business experience. In the interview, Halstead admits that when it comes to mobile, his company will probably have to partner with someone in order to deliver Curl-based RIAs onto handsets.