Frontier
UserLand's first product release of April 1989 was UserLand IPC, a developer tool for interprocess communication that was intended to evolve into a cross-platform RPC tool. In January 1992 UserLand released version 1.0 of Frontier, a scripting environment for the Macintosh which included an object database and a scripting language named UserTalk. At the time of its original release, Frontier was the only system-level scripting environment for the Macintosh, but Apple was working on its own own scripting language, AppleScript, and started bundling it with the MacOS 7 system software. As a consequence, most Macintosh scripting work came to be done in the less powerful, but free, scripting language provided by Apple.
In response, UserLand came to re-position Frontier as a Web development environment, distributing the software free of charge with the "Aretha" release of May 1995. In late 1996, Frontier 4.1 had become "an integrated development environment that lends itself to the creation and maintenance of Web sites and management of Web pages sans much busywork," and by the time Frontier 4.2 was released in January 1997, the software was firmly established in the realms of website management and CGI scripting, allowing users to "taste the power of large-scale database publishing with free software."
Frontier's NewsPage suite came to play a pivotal role in the emergence of blogging through its adoption by Jorn Barger, Chris Gulker and others in the 1997–98 period.
UserLand launched a Windows version of Frontier 5.0 in January 1998 and began charging for licenses again with the 5.1 release of June 1998.
Frontier subsequently became the kernel for two of UserLand's products, Manila and Radio Userland, as well as Dave Winer's OPML Editor, all of which support the UserTalk scripting language.
Userland eventually placed Frontier under the open source GNU General Public License with the 10.0a1 release of September 28, 2004. Frontier is now maintained by the Frontier Kernel Project.
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Famous quotes containing the word frontier:
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