I just learned that Jake Savin is working on bringing Frontier back to modern OS.
Frontier was truly a one-of-a-kind piece of software. The brainchild of Dave Winer and his company UserLand Software.
I started to use it in 1996. In a nutshell Frontier was a object-oriented database (the “ODB”) that could interact with the MacOS-system (using AppleEvents). It came with a simple scripting language called UserTalk that manipulated objects in the ODB. UserTalk scripts were living inside the ODB itself, as were variables, pointers, texts even full outlines.
The script interpreter, the ODB browser, the code editor, the outliner … everything was inside the application. While this was very proprietary, it also was very convenient: There was no need to install and configure different parts or juggle with URLs and API keys. Zero setup. Just double click the application.
Nowadays I wish the ease of use would be back. But there is so much “stuff” you have to align before you can work. Project folders, environment variables, API keys, environments, dependencies… everything has to be made “right” first before it can work.
Because Frontier was able to control MacOS applications through AppleEvents, it offered a pathway to automate things with applications that common users only interacted with directly with mouse and keyboard. And because there was a database attached, it was easy to have everything scripted… or turn data into HTML pages (putting HTML pages on HTTP servers was the “skill du jour” at that time).
Not long and UserLand came up with the idea to add an HTTP server to Frontier directly and render pages “on request” — a simple CMS was born and »Manila« later offered a way to run multi-site pages of a single Frontier instance.
Dave Winer kept a diary of daily notes on scripting.com (which is still does) and adopted that “daily posting” format to Manila’s default as “weblog”. From this work the adoption of the RSS-format for sharing updates and “RSS with URLs to mp3 files” (= Podcasts) came along (I think the idea to include references to hosted soundfiles came from a discussion of Dave Winer with dutch radio host Adam Curry).
I wonder if Jake will not only revive this piece of Internet history but also get it to be relevant again… maybe as an Agent coordination platform?