Frontier 5.0.2 Status Report
The next few weeks will be busy here on www.scripting.com!Here's what's coming...
The first public release of ContentServer/B. It's coming out great, the perfect workflow platform for teams of web developers, graphics people, template designers, and writers. It's built for teams where the people communicate with the rendering engine thru email, FTP or file sharing. ContentServer/B doesn't require that the team members have Frontier.
Frontier will get a WEBDAV client and server, offering a much richer and higher performance connection than ContentServer with one caveat, to get the benefit all team members must be running Frontier. Over time that won't be necessary (but we'll make it desirable). Other developers will do clients -- it will be great when HomePage, PhotoShop, Fusion and DreamWeaver are part of this new workflow.
Unlike past evangelisms, we believe this one will actually gain traction because Microsoft is seriously involved with WEBDAV.
The first public release of our core XML facilities includes a compiler, a set of access routines that walk the structure, and a tutorial with screen shots. The goal is to teach the most expert Frontier developers, over the next few weeks, how to write XML-based applications running in Frontier's object database.
Platform-specific stuff. The Mac version of Frontier is getting native TCP. This will allow our Macintosh users and developers to build great Betty applications and make them available to Frontier/Win users. On the Windows side, Frontier will become an iDispatch-based COM server.
7-by-24 server-side, both platforms. We're committed to crash-free and leak-free round the clock server performance . We're still finding crashing bugs and leaks. I'm confident that we'll get them all very soon. Doug and Bob are both focused on this.
Betty running behind Apache, IIS, Netscape, WebSTAR, etc. Right now Betty is set up to only be accessible thru Frontier's built-in web server. This requirement will be relaxed.
We hope to finalize our RPC over HTTP via XML interface next week. It'll be the easiest way to build net-based applications, and will connect Frontier to code running on other OSes and in other environments such as Java.
When we reach closure on some or all of these features, we'll roll them into the Root Updates process, and then release 5.0.2. Strategy
Our strategy is becoming really clear. Workflow is what we do. We're on the server and on the content developer workstation.
Teamwork via the Internet. Great rendering thru XML-based interfaces.
To pull this off, we need the strongest and most reliable server functionality, so we can deploy it where ever it's appropriate to.
As usual, the object database, its outline interface and deeply integrated scripting are the big wins.
It's a time of huge accomplishment here. It's great!
Dave Winer
March 20, 1998
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This page was last built on 3/26/98; 7:30:46 AM by Dave Winer. dave@scripting.com |