[MacPerl] Frontier substitute

[Xah Lee <xah@best.com>]

I don't know if there will remain a free version of Frontier. In any case
I never saw what's so special about Frontier's web managining facilities.
All I see is a "database" and a set of conventions for the rendering
process. The whole thing can be emulated in any file system with a
scripting language. The problem I see is that the file system
used by OS may not be as efficient for this purpose, and it is
difficult to agree upon a "protocol" without some driving force. But,
for personal web management, Perl and OS file system will do.

The Frontier language is more nice and powerful than AppleScript, but
not comparable to Perl. Before I was using MacPerl to do some regex
parsing my web logs, I was using Frontier's regex add-on, and it is
perhaps 10 times as slow.

AppleScript would improve much more on speed with its upcoming version.

In any case, there is a free "Frontier-replacement" project on the Linux,
see
http://www.ntlug.org/casbah/

Dave Winer (the Founder of Frontier)'s annoucement about the
commercializing Frontier can be seen at

http://www.scripting.com/davenet/98/06/ready.html

this article is quite exemplary of his writings, perhaps best
characterized as "megalomaniac and incomprehensible childish whinings".

 Xah, xah@best.com
 http://www.best.com/~xah/MathGraphicsGallery_dir/Tiling_dir/tiling.html
 "dig dig! we must dig!"



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