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What is Frontier?What is Frontier?What is Frontier? 06/27/2004 04:46 AM Bouche la be! 27 Septembre 2001 6:20 - c'est aujourd'hui. Votre vote: ah bon .. Userland fraternity .. What is Frontier? .. FrontierFrontier .. Frontiers .. software .. Frontier frontier.userland.com This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)What is Frontier?Grok Headline matches for What is Frontier?Frontier DreamsFrontier Dreams 05/21/2004 12:50 PM In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about the open-s ourcing of the Frontier kernel, and like some other folks it’s made me dream of software that’s close in spirit to the early versions of Frontier, before it became the basis for a content management system. For those who don’t know, Frontier began life as a scripting system for Macintosh. But not just another language—it included an object database and a relatively rich (for the time) library of verbs. You wrote code in an outliner, which I still think is a wonderful way to write code. You used it do many of the same things people use Perl and Python (and so on) for today, only it was on Macintosh System 7. Instead of using pipes and Unix-y things for inter-application communication, it used Apple events. (Like AppleScript.) It was very common to use Frontier to do tasks that required scripting one or more other applications. For instance, your script might grab data from a Filemaker database, format it as text in Frontier, then create a new email message in Eudora and send it. With Frontier’s scheduler, its cron-equivalent, you could make this happen once an hour or whatever. And you might archive the data in its object database and create weekly reports based on that data. That’s just a for-instance, of course. The gist of it was that it made it possible to do custom things that apps like Filemaker and Eudora would never (quite rightly) have supported on their own. Sounds like AppleScript, right? Well, yes. But Frontier brought some things that AppleScript doesn’t have. (The browse-able object database, the richer library of verbs, the code outliner, the scheduler, and so on. Frontier is an entire environment on its own, though an open one, aware of the rest of the system.) My dream app First thing—I don’t have plans to work on Frontier. I’d love to use the results of someone else’s work, though! As much fun as it would be for me to work on it (partly because the kernel is an old friend, but more so because I know a lot of Frontier users who are cool cats) it just isn’t on my path. However, I’d be happy to make sure my software works well with people who want to script it with Frontier. Anyway... my dream app goes back to that earlier vision of Frontier. To bring it up-to-date, there are a few things I’d love to see: Python Whitespace-aware Python just begs to be written in an outliner. The language is similar in style to UserTalk (Frontier’s scripting language), but, key fact, it’s object-oriented. The object-oriented thing is a big deal: I’ve gotten so I won’t even consider writing in a procedural language for anything but the smallest of tasks. I want objects. And Python is just plain cool. I wouldn’t advocate dropping UserTalk, I’d argue for making Python a first-class peer of UserTalk. There are some challenges to consider, though. Frontier internally is receptive to other languages. (Note that you can write scripts in any OSA language, including AppleScript). But you’d have to make it so Python could access the object database (to store and retrieve data and to call other scripts) and you’d want a way to freeze-dry Python objects in the database. Cocoa front-end Okay, obviously I don’t care about classic Mac OS or Windows. I care about OS X. When Frontier was written, there were no system-supplied user interface controls for tables, outlines, and toolbars. And all applications polled for events (via WaitNextEvent, if I remember correctly). The first obvious thing to do is replace a bunch of the user interface code with .nib files and standard Cocoa widgets. However, I think I’d retain the existing outliner for writing scripts. (Cocoa and Carbon can co-exist: it’s not a problem.) But all toolbars, the object-database browser, text-editing views, and so on would use Cocoa user interface. In theory, you’d end up with less code, better performance, and a modern OS X UI. Bonus points: custom windows Sometimes you want to create a mini-application, a custom dialog or window backed by a script. Frontier has a long history (at least on classic Mac OS) of supporting this: you could run dialogs from resources, you could run MacBird cards. In the year 2004, the thing to do would be to run dialogs and windows from .nib files. You’d lay out your user interface using Interface Builder, then run it in Frontier. How would you handle wiring up actions and outlets to scripts in Interface Builder? Glad you asked. You probably wouldn’t. One way to handle this is to give each item a unique tag in IB. Then your script might have a handler like on itemDidSendAction (itemRef,
actionRef). This would be called when a checkbox was clicked, a
button pressed, whatever. Your script would, obviously, have to branch
on which item sent the action and what the action was. Not quite as
slick as wiring up actions, but it would work.The other side of the coin is outlets. That’s where tags come in. To get a reference to an item, you might write something like itemRef = cocoaWindow.itemWithTag (tag, windowRef). Then
you could do things like set the value of a text field like so:
cocoaWindow.setStringValueForItem (itemRef,
someString).Double bonus points Get PyObjC in the mix of all this, and now you’re talking about something extraordinary. Anyway... It’s possible that there will be an exciting burst of creativity once the kernel is made open-source. I think that’s totally cool, it it comes to be. For my part, I’d be happy to answer any questions I can for people who work on the code, since I know a little about it. It’s entirely possible that the things I’d like to see are not the things most people would like to see, and that’s fine. (But I can dream, right?) P.S. A glimpse into the kernel: The first thing you’ll discover is that, before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon. The next search frontierThe next search frontier 06/14/2004 04:35 PM Source: cnnmoney - Investors' focus right now is mainly on the Web search market and the battles breaking out between Ask Jeeves, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But later this year, you'll see interest shift to the emerging market for... Open FrontierOpen Frontier 05/17/2004 08:44 AM Dave Winer: At some point in the next few months, there will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel. Does anybody remember Domino Go WebServer? Anybody? Bueller? The thought process that Dave describes exactly mirrors the thought process that IBM went through a few years back when it decided to participate in Apache. CSS3 - The new FrontierCSS3 - The new Frontier 05/14/2004 07:53 AM Web Development stands on the edge of mostly unexplored territory — the mysterious realm of CSS3. How will CSS3 radically change the way we create websites? More importantly, what bits of CSS3 are already supported? This article will answer these questions. A New Frontier for HumanityA New Frontier for Humanity 06/21/2004 12:41 PM It's impossible to overstate the importance of this morning's privately funded space flight by Mike Melvill, who piloted SpaceShipOne into a suborbital flight 100 kilometers high. Neil Armstrong took a giant step in 1969, but this was just as important. I have huge respect for NASA, the U.S. space agency. But NASA needs the help of private explorers and industry, and of people like Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founded who funded this mission. We need NASA for the giant endeavors, but we need privately funded space flight for everything else. Congratulations to all.
Frontier and ForkingFrontier and Forking 05/22/2004 03:34 PM It’s become obvious to me (and, I think, to folks like Jim Roepcke) that Frontier has at least two main areas of interest, reflecting its dual heritage. On one hand, there are fogeys like me who would love a desktop scripting system that totally embraces OS X. We look back at Frontier of ten years ago and say, hey, we want that, only better and updated for 2004. On the other hand, there are folks using Radio UserLand and running Manila servers that would like improvements to the server and content management features. (There may be other areas of interest, but these are the ones I’ve identified so far.) The fogeys (generally speaking) care about an updated user interface, support for more languages, support for scripting more applications (system.verbs.apps.iTunes?), and so on. The idea is a desktop tool that makes it easier to get more work done. But folks using Radio and Manila care about scalability, running as a daemon, a Linux port, separating the UI from the server, and so on. Those are all valid and important issues. As a fogey, I don’t even care that it runs on Windows. But if you’re running a Manila server on Win2K, you very much care, quite rightly, that it runs on Windows. As a fogey, I care more about syntax coloring in the script editor than I care about extending the upper limit of database file size. But if you run a Manila server your priorities are the reverse. That’s just to say that this could potentially be a serious challenge to whoever manages the kernel. There could be pressure to fork it, more so than most other applications, because of the two strongly different directions it could go in. What approach might the maintainers take? One possibility is something like Mozilla-like. With Mozilla, there is a base on which different applications are created. Some of those applications (Firefox) are cross-platform, and others (Camino) are not. This makes sense to me, because it allows the deep under-the-hood parts (the script evaluator, the object database, etc.) to be shared between these hypothetical different versions of the app. What I would not like to see happen is a complete fork, where folks with different visions take it in different directions without coordination or sharing. There are so many things I don’t know. Will there be a community of people that want to work on the app? How many fogeys are there, really? (Maybe we’re grossly outnumbered.) What license will be used? Will there be any kind of formal or informal organization charged with maintaining the kernel? If so, what will be their priorities, and how open will they be to different visions? As I’ve repeated before, I don’t plan to work on the kernel, fun as it would be, since I’m so busy with my own software—but I like thinking and writing about this story, since it could be the birth of a really great open source project, and it has some interesting and unique dimensions. I’m fascinated by it. IT's Final FrontierIT's Final Frontier 03/06/2004 02:02 AM FEATURE: Private IT firms -- especially networking, security and chipmakers -- must play a critical role in NASA's moon and Mars missions, experts say. What's more, NASA has to let them. The Frontier of Oil RefiningThe Frontier of Oil Refining 04/04/2005 07:10 PM Frontier Oil is profiting handsomely from being able to process heavy crude oil. But what's the earnings potential? Internet the new frontier in war on
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