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Chapter 1 ✦ Introducing Curl
is more ingrained with the public. Once converted to Curl, however, public transac-
tion sites may have the biggest cost saving.
Fitting into Your Infrastructure
Adding any new tool to your arsenal requires both business and technical planning.
As this is a technical book, most of the chapters focus on technical learning and
planning. However, we start by discussing business planning here since it often sets
the parameters and goals for technical planning.
Business planning
The gentle slope aspect of learning Curl makes it relatively easy to add it into your
current development environment. Naturally, you will want to weigh the costs and
benefits of using Curl. Many of the benefits of Curl were already covered in this
book’s introduction, but a quick summary would be that Curl allows your applica-
tions to
✦ Provide a richer interface.
✦ Provide faster response time for your users in many cases.
✦ Provide better security for your applications.
The idea of a richer interface merits a brief elaboration. Curl permits direct manipu-
lation of the interface by your users, enabling them, for example, to resize tables,
sort data, use configurators, and rotate graphics. This creates stickier application
sessions.
On the cost side, Curl has many advantages. In the heady dot-com boom days of
the late 1990s, revenue was king and nobody cared about the cost, let alone profits.
Those days are gone, gone, gone. Back in the real world, cost is a crucial aspect of
any business’s profitability. When examining the cost of switching to a new technol-
ogy, you would normally consider
✦ Cost of hiring and training Curl developers
✦ Cost of supporting dual development environments during transition
✦ Cost of Curl development tools
✦ Cost in time and dollars to develop and code projects in Curl
✦ Cost in time and dollars to test Curl applications
✦ Cost of deploying and operating a Curl application
✦ Cost of maintenance to fix problems and extend a Curl application
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