JFRED was developed by Robby Garner and Paco Xander Nathan. The acronym "JFRED" refers to Java-based FRED Response Emulation Devices. The software platform developed around the deployment of Barry DeFacto, a personality built first as a C++ CGI program, but then re-designed as a Java web server, and eventually as a tiny applet. JFRED requires Java JDK 1.1 and is released as an Open Source project under the GNU Public License. This JFRED release compiles and works well with SDK 1.4.2 and netbeans 4.0.
Overall, JFRED provides a natural language interface for Internet software that can be described as:
The server supports a variety of front-end/client interfaces, including direct telnet, HTML/Servlet forms, Expect scripts, MOO bots, and Java applets embedded in HTML pages, as well as standard I/O for testing.