Curl International to merge with Sumisho (SCS)

A news item in Japanese at http://curlap.com/ reports that at their April 28, 2010 annual meeting, Sumisho Computer Systems Corporation (SCS) announced that Curl International their wholly owned subsidiary, would merge into SCS.

Curl Corporation and Curl International were formed in 2004 following the Sumisho acquisition of the MIT spin-off Curl.

While tech journalists have been noting the issues between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash, there tends to be little mention in the press of Curl as an alternative to Flash + HTML + Javascript + CSS.

Curl was developed at MIT as a web content language and is now used almost exclusively by Japanese corporate clients of Sumisho. An exception is the widespread use of Curl by corporate clients of Paisley, now owned by Reuters.

In 2009, Curl Corporation in Cambridge MA had relocated from the square at MIT to few blocks away and then had down-sized further late in the year. Curl Corporation should be unaffected by the merger.

Curl 7.0 was the last release of the Curl environment; several open-source Curl projects are hosted at sourceforge.net and code.google. SCS's focus on corporate needs may help boost work on the Curl external library project which would help site-specific web browsers in wrapping Apple WebKit, for example.

As an alternative to HTML + Javascript + CSS, the notable requirement for Curl, like Flash, Air or Silverlight, is the Curl runtime environment - either for desktop or as a web browser plugin. Curl had not developed a server-side solution and had failed to protect their trademark (Curl is often confused with haxx.se cURL.)

In the USA the corporate office of SCS in New York.