News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community
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News and commentary from the cross-platform scripting community
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Bob Denny is the author of O'Reilly's WebSite web server for Windows.
By an interesting coincidence, Bob is an old friend from the very early days of the Mac software biz.
He was the founder of Alisa Systems, an early networking vendor.
I saw Bob briefly at the JavaOne conference in April. He looked really happy!
What a neat idea! The VC Exchange trades stocks in non-public VC-backed companies. It's just a game! |
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OK! We're back from Thanksgiving... The first topic on my mind this morning is how CGI scripting interfaces work on Windows. I know *nothing* about this! Please educate me. Send mail to dave@scripting.com.
Questions:
If someone wants to write a definitive piece on this, I'll post it.
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DaveNet: Thanksgiving 1997.
Ranchero Software: Web File Types CMM Plugin. Mac Dan Gillmor's Thanksgiving column in the SJ Mercury-News. |
 Hmmm... Tasty! |
A correction to Veen's piece: Frontier 5 will also run on Windows NT. I'm using NT 4.0 right now to write this text using Frontier's outliner and rendering the HTML text thru the website framework in Frontier.
I like Veen's piece! We'll get into server-side stuff, especially on faster machines, but for right now Frontier is mostly used for rendering static pages that are not rebuilt every time they're accessed.
In the meantime, we haven't forgotten that Frontier is also used
for CGI scripting.
Wired: Microsoft to hold a Java developer briefing next month in Seattle.
MacWEEK takes a first look at Macromedia's DreamWeaver HTML editor.
8/22/95: What is a Platform?
SJ Merc: DOJ says Microsoft officials lied.
http://www.recommend-it.com/ is a Frontier site.
If you use Frontier outlines for HTML coding, you gotta check out HALO. How did I miss this?
SilverStream looks very interesting.
While things are slower now, why not read 10 Random DaveNets?
Apple donates its history to Stanford. Good move!
The Atlantic Monthly reviews Riven.
Reading the regcards, we learned that a bunch of people are intimidated by the techy discussions on the main Frontier mailing lists. So we started the Frontier-newbies list, moderated by Thea Partridge, with a unique approach, a commitment to keep it focused on the easy and simple stuff. Still diggin!
If you're using Frontier on one of the new G3 Macs you definitely need
the 9600 fix
released on 9/12/97.
A picture taken at Sunday's 49ers game in SF. That's me in the foreground (looking serious!) and Aryeh, Jacob and Marc Canter in the background. Go Niners!
A great Frontier site. You'll laugh!
PC WEEK: Gates says DOJ action could kill Windows. Don't worry Bill, we'll save it!
CNN: IBM shows Internet-ready car. Is it scriptable?
Slate reviews Esther Dyson's new book.
Was it worth the effort to port Frontier to Windows? Read on...
From a Sun engineer who's been playing with Frontier 5.0a16/Win: "I am ... blown away is the right way to describe my feeling. In fact, it's eerily like when I first discovered Emacs. At that time I wrote a congrat email to James Gosling, and now I'm writing one to you! This is a winner idea. Having an ODB with a name space and stored scripts and the scripts have access to the name space directly. First time I heard about it I said, yeah sure that's nice, it just didn't hit home how powerful this is until I actually used it." That feels so incredibly good!
The answer is yes, it was worth the trouble. Let's have fun!
Here's a list of all the UserLand-hosted mail lists, on one page.
Two new lists: Scripting Announcements and Frontier-newbies.
Our mail server, mail.scripting.com, was off the air, but it's back now.
A redesign of my personal website, including part two of my life as a software developer, a site outline and a screen shot of my Windows NT work environment.
Here's what Solitaire looks like just as you're about to win.
Wired's Jeff Veen on the WebMonkey redesign.
Jakob Nielsen reviews Esther Dyson's new book.
ABC News: Gates’ Internet Fiction.
In October 1994, Gates responded to an early DaveNet piece about Microsoft and the Internet. Re-reading his response in late 1997, yes, I think he was reasonably clued in about the net in 1994.
In July 1997, Jacob Levy, an engineer at Sun wrote an interesting email about Bill Gates. Summary: he's Salieri, not Mozart.
News.com: A great RealAudio soundbite from Gates's Comdex keynote yesterday.
A new HyperCard mailing list.
Oooops!
For about 30 minutes this morning the home page here contained the home page text for my personal site.
That's the trouble with powerful tools, you can make powerful mistakes!
Guy Kawasaki took a trip to Fallon McElligot in the summer of 1996. He took pictures, including one of Matthew Dornquast, the web developer we profiled last week. If you look closely you can see WebSTAR and Frontier on the screen of their Macs.
Here's a chance to do some collaborative development. We need a DLL to connect Frontier 5/Win to web browsers. Spyglass posted docs for a standard interface thru TCP, Apple Events, and DDE. We believe this interface is supported by both Netscape and Microsoft. We already have the Apple Event interface for Frontier/Mac. We want to get a similar suite working with the Windows product. We think the source code for the DDE interface on Windows should be public. Anyone want to do this? We'll get to it eventually if no one does it.
IBM has an interesting website that includes information on how the
Smalltalk environment works.
WebMonkey did a site redesign. What do you think?
Send mail to dave@scripting.com.
This week's Spencer F. Katt has a couple of
juicy tidbits. Microsoft is doing a bundling deal for NT 5.0 with
Marimba, and Apple is getting ready to acquire Silicon Graphics.
PGP Inc. has a special licensing program for shareware developers.
Take a look at the software used by an accomplished Windows NT-based web developer.
There's a picture of Dornquast on Apple's website. He's sitting on a chair in a very weird way!
To Mac people, don't worry! Next week or the week after we'll focus on the Mac again. We're deep into the process of cleaning up and getting the Windows version of Frontier released. It's only natural that we'd focus on Windows while this is happening.
Hannes Wallnoefer has been playing with colors in the design of this page. Examples: #1 and #2.
TreeSize
is a Windows utility that tells you what folders use the most disk space.
HotWired's John McChesney interviews Silicon Valley attorney Gary Reback on Microsoft and anti-trust.
Here's a Sun Microsystems website that was built in Frontier by John Lieske, johnl@cnet.com. It's beautiful!
Mason Hale used TextPad for a while, but switched to UltraEdit because it does syntax coloring and integrates with external apps like Sun's Java compiler. He also uses HomeSite to edit HTML text. hale@onr.com.
It's great to meet up with Mason again! He was pivotal in the development of Frontier as a Mac CGI scripting environment and wrote pieces about his experiences with AppleScript and WebObjects.
Patrick Curtain's favorite Windows text editor is Codewright 5.0.
Windows FTP clients:
FTP Explorer,
Cute FTP.
Nombas: ScriptEase Integration SDK.
Matthew Dornquast, mdornquast@shl.com, says MultiEdit for Windows is a great BBEdit alternative/replacement for HTML editing.
Another webmaster, Chris Laco, likes TextPad for editing HTML text on Windows.
James Hebert likes PFE and Emacs.
Searchable archive for the Windows-Newbies list.
The members of the Java Lobby are debating Sun's benchmarks (and a DaveNet piece from last week).
Consider this a historic anomaly.
I'm working this morning on an overhaul of the website building stuff in Frontier 5.
Testing it out on the Scripting News home page.
If you see macro errors, they're part of the experience!
Please don't send me email about this. 
Do you have an award-winning website?
Here's one! This site is managed with Frontier. Of course!
Right on! Sun officials say they went too far in the benchmark.
It would be great if Apple linked to Frontier from the AppleScript home page. We do nice things with AppleScript!
Bill Gates in the WSJ: Who Decides What Innovations Go Into Your PC?
Interesting fact! You can't read the Bill Gates piece in a Netscape browser because it's missing a </table> tag.
Download page for the Be OS. Good idea!
Another DaveNet: Jobs Was Boring.
MacWEEK report on today's Apple announcements.
Why didn't Jobs promote the Power of Ten program today?
A new mailing list for Windows newbies. Like me!
Microsoft: Keyboard shortcuts in Windows 95.
ZDNet will webcast today's Apple event, starting at 11AM Pacific.
A trip down memory lane: MORE, MORE, Dinosaur
by Matt Neuburg. I still use it!
Sun's 10/20/97 press release:
World's fastest Java.
"Mail Starting 11/6/97", includes comments from Cornelius Willis, director of platform marketing at Microsoft.
A milestone was reached today at 2:20:07PM, with approx 785 days before 12/31/99, the Scripting News home page was built with Frontier 5.0a11 running on Windows NT 4.0. Wish us luck!
The Mail Page component of our content software now runs on Windows as of 6:25PM. It's not working as well as it works on the Mac, Eudora isn't scriptable on Windows, and clipboard.get isn't working in Frontier/Win. So there won't be confirming email until we get a direct TCP function working, and I'm going to have to be selective in postings because there's a fair amount of manual work involved.
Thanks to Dave Bakin who pointed out that the glossary links weren't working on Windows. It was an easy fix. So far so good!
News.com: Sun says what they did was OK.
If Pendragon's claims are true, Sun behaved unethically.
Their marketing people are compounding the problem.
Apple press alert for the 11/10 event.
He's leaving an easy trail to follow! Here's an email from Steve Jobs to an Apple reseller in Chicago.
Earlier today, the San Jose Mercury suggested that the big news is direct Dell-like selling of Macs to end users.
Here's a server that Apple could run this application on. It's running Netscape-Enterprise/2.01, which isn't available for Mac OS or OpenStep, but is often used with WebObjects on NT or Solaris. It's the same software that's running The Vatican website.
Everyone's going to be pointing to this QuickTime movie today.
TechWeb: IETF may ratify S/MIME as the secure mail standard.
Happy third birthday to MacInTouch!
Bill McKibben in Salon: Gandhi was no pitchman.
News.com is starting to ask the tough questions about Java. Yaaaay!
Steve Harley, harley@visi.com, says consistent UIs are a good thing. I agree! The News.com article asked what makes the Lotus announcement different from the previous alliances announced to build a decent UI library into Java. My two cents: People write software, not alliances.
Hunter S. Thompson: Doomed love at the taco stand.
Alternate Scripting News header from jjones@synergos.com.
CNET's Dan Shafer looks at the server market. How many Mac OS servers are out there? Doesn't it matter how they move forward?
Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi talks about browser market share.
Here's a July CNN interview with Mehdi; and a USA Today report from August 1996 that put MSIE's share at between 5 and 10 percent.
We're moving fast on fixing the scripts in Frontier's object database to be cross-platform. An updated package of 5.0 objects was uploaded last night, with change notes.
Info-Zip -- free, portable versions of the Zip and UnZip compressor-archiver utilities that are compatible with the DOS-based PKZIP.
Jim Correia came up with a short script that works
without crashing with ZipIt 1.3.8. We're cookin with gas now!
Preston Holmes travels to New Orleans. (With pictures!)
What powerful cross-platform web scripting
means to UserLand.
Fred Moody on ABCNEWS.com: Best Attorneys Money Can Buy.
Another round of changes in the Frontier 5 verb set,
following yesterday's changes.
If you've released code that other people are using, it's important that you check out the
changes we're making to suites.toys
in Frontier 5.
Back issues...
Check out Scripting News -- October 1997.
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See the directory site for a list of important pages on this server This page was last built on 12/1/97 at 4:34:44 AM, with Frontier version 5.0a20. Internet service provided by Conxion. Mail to: dave@scripting.com. At the moment I'm building this site on Windows NT. © copyright 1997 UserLand Software. |
