Somehow this slipped through my net for a year. Which says a lot, since for years and years I followed Scripting News daily (it would have been the first feed I ever consumed, sometime in the last century :o). I guess I stopped listening when we got fed up developing in a proprietary and obsolescent platform and made the arduous move of all our web applications from Frontier to Zope/Plone. Still, this has got to be good news. I just wish it had been made about 4-6 years earlier, when Frontier was world-beating. We might well all have the benefit of a richer, more diverse web by now.

The beginning of a new era?

OK, "new era" may be a bit over the top, but Frontier contains an incredible combination of features, thanks in part to a vibrant community of active contributors for over a decade. UserLand will carry on with their "website and weblog publishing tools". Will a new community form around Frontier's general-purpose scripting environment? (It's starting.) Will the old fogey's come back? (Some have!) Will a new generation discover the power of an integrated, customizable development and runtime environment with persistent storage and ubiquitous outlining? Kudos to Dave Winer and UserLand for the decision.

I am a fan of Dave Winer. I always have been, and I do not care who was in the right in the little skirmish that led to atom, I always will be. It was his imagination, practicality and devotion to simplicity that gave us RSS, web-logging, XML-RPC, remote-posting APIs, etc etc --- all the best service-oriented, distributed, content-free-ing aspects of the web we live in.

But I well remember our own deep frustration with the direction that Userland Frontier went in the late 90's and early 00's. For years Frontier had been a de fact open platform for experimentation in web applications and services. It had not been 'free software', but it had been 'free of charge' and made a lovely plug-in-able platform for evolving conventions and motifs for the two-way web. Then Winer went and decided everyone needed to pay money for it! We were all shocked at the time, but we here persevered and purchased development copies, hoping that the ancient free versions would suffice for others wanting to run our apps and frameworks.

In a way, I think I was waiting and hoping for Dave ( can I call him Dave? ) to change his mind and declare Frontier to be open-source. Of course he would eventually: he had led the way in proposing the simple, small / loose open standards that built weblogging, it was clear that philosophically he was 'open'... Sadly, my own waiting went on too long, and in 2004 KnowNet laboriously ported all its work to Zope and Plone. I suspect something similar happened to a high proportion of former Frontier-based developers.

Well, here we are. We've moved to Zope, Frontier has moved to open-source. Will we ever meet again? Will anybody care enough to really push at the core of Frontier to make it into a modern framework for object-oriented application/service development? I'll tell you one thing: I've subscribed to Scripting News again :o)