FramerD 2.3 is now available as a beta release.

The beta release of FramerD 2.3 is now available to be downloaded.
(Note that FramerD development has now moved from MIT to SourceForge.)

FramerD provides:

• an internationalized Scheme implementation (FDScript) with support for Unicode in both programs and data
• a robust object store and index designed to support very large (> 10^6 nodes) pointer-intensive distributed databases
• built-in support for non-deterministic programming allowing the perspicuous expression of search and set operations
• a rich library of text matching, analysis, and rewriting functions including parsers for MIME-encoded messages, XML, and HTML
• the ability to divide processing and data among lightweight servers distributed across multiple machines
• operating system access functions useful for command line scripting, including interaction with other programs or services through sockets or pipes

New with Version 2.3 of FramerD, we have:

• substantially improved memory performance
• optimized set/choice operations permitting log or linear time operations in many cases
• robust and efficient utilization of multiple processors on SMP (symmetric multi processing) architectures
• better integration with Apache for dynamic generation of web pages with the fdcgi and fdxml executables
• improved mime parsing with handling of Unicode data in headers
• plugin architectures for adding new kinds of pools and indices
• extended subjob and networking socket support (subjob support remains incomplete under WIN32)
• builtin MIME, XML, and HTML parsers for dealing with external textual data
• extension of character operations to full Unicode and provisions for interpreting compound Unicode characters
• support for UTF-8 locales

As mentioned above, development work on FramerD and Java FramerD have now moved from MIT to SourceForge and anonymous CVS access is available at :pserver:anonymous@cvs.framerd.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/framerd.

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 all the standard POSIX library functions
• FDScript bindings to the major windowing toolkits (GTK & QT)
• implementation of CORBA connectivity for FramerD
• 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 which works (and has been used in applications) but has had little attention paid to performance and only partial attention (frankly) to robustness
• more documentation, especially tutorials and example programs

For help already received, special thanks are due to Ralph Campbell, Tim Chklovski, and Matthew Fredette for bug finding. In addition, thanks to beingmeta, inc. for providing a copy of Insure++ to help in making FramerD a more robust and secure platform.

The primary support for FramerD development has also moved from MIT to 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 or LGPL. 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.