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Part I ✦ Curl Content Language Fundamentals
The following sections examine each of these costs in more detail.
Hiring and training
The big win with Curl is that your development staff can focus on becoming expert
in one client-side language rather than average in many languages. The cost of
teaching developers Curl might be offset by not having to train each person in
multiple languages.
Curl is relatively easy to learn, so you won’t need to hire Curl-only developers.
Anyone can quickly learn Curl’s text formatting features; HTML experience is not
required. To use the programmatic aspects of Curl, experience with any object-
oriented language (Java, C++, Eiffel, Smalltalk, Dylan) would suffice.
Curl’s gentle slope learning curve means that whatever a person’s current experi-
ence with Curl, learning the next feature is only slightly harder. This is a remarkable
accomplishment as compared to other languages, such as C++, that require huge
time investments before one can become proficient.
In addition to books like this, developers can learn Curl from the resources listed in
“Finding Curl Information,” later in this chapter. Curl Corporation also offers hands-
on training.
Dual environment costs
Often, switching to new tools comes with the hidden cost of maintaining your
existing system while developing the new one. This means that, during the transi-
tion, you need to have staff expertise with many tools. You may even need to have
separate hosting environments. Since Curl can usually be phased into your existing
architecture, there is rarely a need to support dual development environments. (An
exception might be public transaction sites.) Thus, this cost is often zero, or very
low. “Technical planning,” later in this chapter, explains why this is true.
Development costs
Using Curl, development times are similar to— or faster than — normal, once you
have trained developers. Partly, this is because Curl is a powerful language and
partly this is because your developers spend less time working around the quirks
of using multiple languages. Figure 1-1 shows how fast complexity grows when
there are more tools involved.
The graph in Figure 1-1 shows that accounting for the interactions between two
tools is 10 times easier than having five tools and 21 times easier than having seven
tools. For enhancements and bug fixes, having a uniform language makes it easier
for one developer to modify another developer’s code. Plus, Curl development tools
are free.
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