Connected and Compatible

Wednesday, March 4, 1998 by Dave Winer.

Good morning!

A very brief piece this morning with a little bit of news and a pointer.

Frontier 5.0.1 

On Monday we shipped Frontier 5.0.1 for Windows and Mac.

A few new features in this release, but as you would expect, it mostly fixes bugs that we didn't get in the 5.0 release in late January.

There will be a 5.0.2 and quite possibly a 5.0.3.

The process continues...

Interapplication communication 

Frontier has been built, since version 1.0, to communicate with other software.

We've supported protocols from Apple, Microsoft, Quark, Aldus, Symantec, Metrowerks, Netscape, and many others. We've developed our own interapplication methods, and had them supported by many of the same companies in their products.

In Frontier 5 we added support for TCP-based protocols, notably HTTP, and we're doing more development towards a rich framework of client-server software built on HTTP. Our current priority is implementing COM connections on Windows, both client and server.

Our philosophy has always been the more protocols, the better. This allows us to differentiate our environment as the one that can communicate with everything.

And now we want one more way to communicate -- one that is vendor-independent and cross-platform. Earlier this week I posted our plan for this protocol, openly, in the hope that other technologists working in other environments or on other operating systems would work with us to quickly arrive at a simple agreed-to format for this kind of communication.

http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/xml/plan.html

We've been in touch with several other companies working in this area.

Comments, questions and suggestions are welcome.

I think XML offers a unique chance to implement vendor-independent, cross-platform, interapplication communication.

Let's all be connected and compatible.

Dave Winer