JFRED was developed by Robby Garner and Paco Xander Nathan., with contributions by Søren Gjellerup Christiansen. 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.
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.