Curl ships commercial version of its open source web services dev kit for RIA Platform

Development tools vendor Curl -- which is going up against Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Flex and OpenLazlo in the Rich Internet Applications arena -- announced the commercial release of its open source web services development kit (WSDK) on Tuesday.

The WSDK is one of three open source projects launched late last year by the Cambridge, Mass company. Its inclusion in the current Curl Rich Internet Application Platform 6.0 will enable customers to build enterprise -class web applications that make use of web service protocols such as SOAP and WSDL and the XML document model. The RIA platform's support of web service protocols makes it ideal for service-oriented architecture (SOA) deployments, the company maintains.

Aside from the WSDK, Curl launched in 2007 two other open source projects -- the Curl Data Kit for data-centric app dev and the Curl Development Utilities toolchest -- all of which are provided under the Apache V 2.0 License. The projects are hosted by SourceForge.

As it goes up against Microsoft, Adobe and other open source RIA projects such as OpenLazlo, Curl will try to accelerate developer interest in its platform through its new common repository of open source component libraries, developers said on the Curl blog.

"This is our first Open Source product. Back in October of last year, we contributed 3 components to Open Source. This was the first step in our open source strategy," wrote Teadway, vice president of product strategy for Curl, who is based in San Jose, Calif. "We will continue to contribute key components of the product that help support rapid development of enterprise-class RIAs to open source."

Meanwhile, Lazlo Systems, whose OpenLazlo open source RIA platform version 4.0 is available under the open source Common Public license, recently raised $6.6 million in its third round of funding.