Why Frontier?

Frontier is scriptable

Frontier has features that uniquely qualify it to act as a powerful and effective Web site management tool.

The most important of these is that Frontier is completely scriptable. It comes with its own fast, powerful internal scripting language (called "UserTalk"). This means that you can modify and extend Frontier's behavior to get "smart" HTML effects automatically.

Suppose, for example, your site consists of three Web pages: let's call them "Manny," "Moe," and "Jack." Let's say that the way you want navigation to work is that each page should start and end with explicit links to the other two: so, "Manny" will have links that say (and lead to) "Moe" and "Jack," while "Moe" will have links that say "Manny" and "Jack," and so on.

You could implement this by hand; but you might make a mistake, and, much more important, if you add a fourth page, and then a fifth page, the job becomes very daunting.

But it isn't a job that really requires any brains, is it? There's a mathematical formula, as it were, involved here: you simply want every page to contain links to all the other pages and not to itself. That's the kind of thing computers are good at.

Frontier doesn't come configured out of the box ready to give your pages this functionality by the simple choice of a menu item, but it is not difficult, writing in the UserTalk language, to give it this functionality.

The point is that as soon as you want a scriptable effect like the one I've just described, Frontier will be there for you. Because you can script Frontier, it can grow with your needs.

Scripting not required

In this tutorial, though, you won't learn much about scripting Frontier with UserTalk. In fact, you won't learn anything about it! That's because Frontier comes already set up for you to start managing your Web site.

That's because somebody else already scripted it for you! Just about all the Web site management features that we'll be learning to use in this tutorial are actually just UserTalk scripts. (A few core routines have been recoded and compiled to give some extra speed, but even this was done only after they had been fully worked out in UserTalk.)

That's a good indication, right there, of the power of Frontier scripting with UserTalk. Frontier didn't start out as a Web site tool: it started out as a scripting tool. Since Frontier can drive itself as well as many other applications, though, it was natural and straightforward to use Frontier as a Web site tool.

Since Frontier is also an open system, you'll actually be able to look at the scripts that do this -- the scripts that respond when you pull down menu items inside Frontier.

What else Frontier is

Here are some more reasons for using Frontier to manage your Web site:

• Frontier is a database. This database is capable of storing anything. Therefore, all the basic material for your entire site -- HTML, pictures, whatever -- can live inside Frontier.

• Frontier is an editor. It can edit text. It can also edit "outlines," a very useful format for structuring HTML, and one which Frontier uses in powerful ways to help you maintain your Web pages. So you not only store your site's material in Frontier; you can work on it there, too.

• Frontier can drive other applications -- including your computer's system. Frontier thus acts as a kind of command center for mustering the resources you use as you work on your Web site. So, it doesn't have to be able to do everything itself, because it knows how to tell other applications to do it.

For instance, Frontier doesn't need to have any HTML WYSIWYG capacities of its own. Because it can drive the system, Frontier can read and create files. So it can make an HTML file. Because it can drive other applications, Frontier can then tell your Web browser to show that file with formatting.

So while other Web site management tools can be bloated and complicated, Frontier stays lean and mean.