User Land

The company that makes Frontier, essentially a scriptable object database. Currently known for EditThisPage, which is an application called Manila running under Frontier.

Frontier also gets known as UserlandFrontier, and is the brainchild of DaveWiner and his cohorts.

Frontier really is an amazing piece of work. Calling it essentially a scriptable object database doesn't quite do it justice.

I'm interested in hearing why - please elaborate if possible.

These guys are right behind XmlRpc in a big way

please elaborate if possible

Well my expertise and familiarity with Frontier doesn't match my respect for what has been achieved.

A good elaboration would go into quite a lot of its history, from dave's background with More, one of the best outliners ever, through his history with AppleEvents and the interapplication communication toolkit at Apple, and then through the way Frontier grew from Aretha into what it is today.

One really good reference, which is now online, is the O'Rielly book about frontier by Matt Neuberg. This book was written a while back, before version 5 and version 6. So it focuses more on the fundamentals that enable it to do the web content management that it is good at now.

The things that make it more than a scriptable object database are the integrated outliner, the large number of builtin system verbs, and the inter-application communication features.

Eventually this stuff can get refactored into a WhatsCoolAboutFrontier page

This page http://frontier.userland.com/, has a lot of marketing stuff, but the Key Features sidebar lists eleven key points about what its good for.

While it could be argued that it is essentially a scriptable object database, all the extras add up to making it a much bigger animal. It really is quite a beast to get to know.

another concise elaboration has been added at UserlandFrontier