What is Frontier?

A quick, tightly written positioning statement on Frontier, UserLand Software, the community, and related technologies.

Frontier is an integrated development environment for building and managing the most powerful high performance websites. It leads the market for automated website development tools.

The target user for Frontier is a webmaster or web developer with experience in system-level scripting.

Frontier applications are used to manage text created by people with no experience scripting or managing websites, nor any assumed desire to learn.

Frontier may be overkill for small sites with just a few pages. It's designed for managing large dynamic sites with lots of authors of varying technical skill level.

A database, scripting language, editors and verbs, CGI platform, UI designer, Mac with Windows coming

Frontier is a tightly integrated object database, with a built-in scripting language, an outline-based script editor/debugger/menu editor, and a comprehensive verb set.

Frontier supports all common scripting interfaces, including the common Apple Event format, and the Apple Event object model. Frontier scripts can control a diverse set of applications, including popular emailers, FTP clients, databases, web browsers and web servers.

Frontier is also a multi-threaded CGI scripting environment, running behind all the popular Mac-based web servers, including Quarterdeck's WebSTAR and Resnova's servers.

Frontier 4.2 is a "fat" app. It includes 68K and native PowerPC code. It's a very fast scripting system, maybe the fastest on any platform (500Mhz Macs coming soon, according to MacWEEK.)

Frontier 4.2 includes the MacBird user interface designer, making it easy to put friendly graphic faces on scripts. As CPUs get faster, it will be possible to do more and more with scripts and MacBird will become a more common way to present functionality to users.

Further, we're porting Frontier to Windows, with the goal of providing as much cross-platform compatibility for scripts as possible. Many of the concepts on Windows were derived from concepts on the Mac platform, so much of what we do, especially the website development tools, is convertible.

It's a community

The Frontier scripting community is a growing group of talented and innovative (and hardworking!) people who love to play at the leading edge.

The central mailing list for the Frontier world is the Frontier-talk list.

The Low Tech Object Distribution Server is the backbone for sharing technology in the Frontier world.

Frontier is a platform for innovation, defined by us, UserLand Software, and by other developers and users who work in this land.

UserLand Software is a California corporation. The principal owner of UserLand is me, Dave Winer. Hello!

Frontier is free

There's not a lot to say about that. You can use it for free. Have fun! We decided to take Frontier out of the commercial software world and let it take root in the Internet. No regrets! We wanted to set a standard, and in a lot of ways, that's happening.

Onward!

Pointers

We now have a Directory of all the sites on www.scripting.com. Many of them contain other information and tutorials for Frontier users.

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© Copyright 1996-97 UserLand Software. This page was last built on 10/23/97; 11:51:08 AM. It was originally posted on 9/26/96; 7:23:13 PM. Internet service provided by Conxion.