Does the Frontier Kernel have a future?

Question

Whatever you think about Dave Winer, Frontier is an incredible piece of software. It includes quite a few advances that have yet to be surpassed: the object database, the database viewer, the scripting environment, the hierarchical-including website generation scheme, the elegant scripting language, the mixing of scripts and compilation, rapid prototyping, built in web server, simple debugger, cross-platform, simple UI, etc.

My question: Dave turned Frontier over to open source and there is a Frontier Kernel project. However it is fairly quiet. Does Frontier have a future from here?

Answer 1

I expect it will have a future as long as Dave Winer continues blogging about it and using it - however for some reason it hasn't really taken off like maybe it deserved to.

Answer 2

Over a year late with this, but I just stumbled over this question.

I looked over the Frontier Kernel site. The only description I could get of the product from a 30-second search was this following sentence, chalk full of marketing-speak: High-performance Web content management, object database, system-level and Internet scripting environment, including source code editing and debugging. (Bold from original.)

This is a useless description, to put it mildly. The problem with it is that EVERY content management system out there describes itself in those terms. There is nothing there to catch the eye and explain why I'd want to use my valuable time to investigate farther.

There is a huge ecosystem of content management systems out there -- I leave the googling for "CMS" as an exercise for the not-so-easily overwhelmed -- and this ecosystem gets larger with every passing minute. (Well, month, at any rate. It just feels like every minute.) Many of them have huge volumes of support in place, huge communities willing to help and easily-accessible (and thoroughly documented) web sites explaining the product.

Frontier has one (not very good) wiki and a pointer to an online copy of an out-of-date, no-longer-in-print book. This is not a strong selling point.

So, given what I've seen? Frontier doesn't have a future and it won't have one until its creators and community learn that merely building the better mousetrap (if it is even such!) isn't enough.