Dave is releasing the Frontier VM as open source. .

Dave is releasing the Frontier VM as open source.. Dave is releasing the Frontier VM as open source. “Products that Manila and Radio compete with don’t have their own kernels, they build off development environments created by others. For example, Movable Type is written in Perl. WordPress is PHP. Blogger is Java. UserLand’s products are different because they build on a private platform. For a long time we saw this as an advantage, the UserLand runtime is very rich and powerful, and offered performance benefits. … But experience in the market said that, to succeed, UserLand didn’t need to own its kernel. In fact, that it was the only developer using this kernel may well have been a liability for UserLand.” My philosophy is that you want to be on a platform that has a big ecosystem around it. The ecosystems can come from a community (Python, Perl, PHP) or BigCos (Java, .NET). If you’re a BigCo you can even build your own ecosystem, but if you’re small you can’t afford it. These days Frontier is way behind the other VMs in performance, libraries, portability, etc. The ODB is great, but it has its problems, like how putting code in the ODB kills integration with external version control systems. [Hack the Planet]

I’m afraid this is too little, too late. Frontier once had a thriving community around it, but this was pretty much killed off when Frontier 5 was released for a huge amount of money and missing important capabilities of Frontier 4. I still have Frontier 4.2.3a on my machine, but all my programming these days is in Python.