FramerD 2.4 is now available for Unix, Win32, and OS X.

beingmeta is delighted to announce the GPL release of FramerD 2.4, a knowledge development and application platform for Unix, Win32, and OS X. This new release can be downloaded from SourceForge.

FramerD is a robust and scalable object database especially designed and optimized for pointer-intensive semi-structured data with complex or evolving data models. FramerD includes full support for Unicode in both data and programs together with powerful tools for text processing and linguistic analysis. These can be accessed through FDScript, a version of Scheme which includes language-level support for non-deterministic (Prolog-style) programming and multi-threaded applications.

FramerD natively supports reading and and generation of XML, HTML, and MIME data. Web services support in FramerD has long included built-in facilities for processing CGI requests both directly and through the persistent FastCGI protocol. With version 2.4, FramerD comes with mod_fdserv, a lightweight extension to the Apache webserver for transparently managing persistent multi-threaded servlets (written in FDScript) responding to CGI requests.

FramerD is implemented in ANSI/POSIX standard C, and can be directly accessed from either compiled code, FramerD's scripting language, or the system command line. FramerD data can also be accessed from Java using a class library also available under the GPL. Work is underway in the open-source community on Python bindings to the FramerD libraries.

FramerD was originally developed at the MIT Media Laboratory as a platform for large scale knowledge representation and media content description. After a decade of development and internal use, MIT released FramerD 2.2 under the LGPL in 2001 as active development work moved to beingmeta, inc.

beingmeta, inc. [website] is a new company developing infrastructure, resources, and applications for knowledge-rich content and knowledge management.

Developers are encouraged to join the work on FramerD; the current wish list includes:

• translations of the FramerD message catalogs into other languages
• FDScript bindings for the remaining standard POSIX library functions
• FDScript bindings to the major windowing toolkits (GTK & QT)
• FDScript bindings for ODBC to allow FramerD to access SQL databases
• someone to help with maintaining and extending the WIN32 port (based on MINGW)
• someone to update the Common Lisp library for FramerD to the latest version of FramerD and the latest versions of Common Lisp
• someone to take the lead on the Java-based FramerD libraries
• more documentation, especially tutorials and example programs

The primary support for FramerD development is based at beingmeta inc., an early-stage startup developing semantically rich knowledge and content management solutions based on a variety of technologies including FramerD. beingmeta is committed to FramerD remaining an open-source technology developed by a heterogenous community and released under the GPL. The final MIT version of FramerD, FramerD 2.2, has been officially released under the LGPL and is available at ftp://ftp.media.mit.edu/pub/framerd/framerd22final.tar.gz or ftp://download.sourceforge.net/pub/sourceforge/framerd/framerd22final.tar.gz.