Frontier at Sun and Apple in Europe

From Michel Benevento, beno@euro.apple.com:

I have two stories for you, one which is already a success, one which will soon be one.

http://www.sun.nl/

I am the webmaster of the Dutch site of Sun Microsystems. For a redesign of their very dead site, I advised them to go with database base web publishing -- Frontier style.

They didn't want to let me do it on a Mac ('the Mac is dead', 'Frontier is free, so it probably crappy'), so I went looking for Solaris based alternatives.

I found a small company who builds a beautiful turnkey solution for newspapers and such -- after some discussions they agreed to sell their Internet Publishing System to Sun for $100,000, (this was a 'prix d'ami'). This was exclusive two engineers who would need a week (!) to install the whole thing.

Previously, we had agreed on a deadline of March 1 to go live with the new site. To meet this challenge, I now rent my 7100/80 to Sun and redesigned ww.sun.nl within a week. All in Frontier.

* Dave, I don't know if you remember the somewhat agitated discussion we had about this, but as you can see, it all worked out! (I wrote an suite called HotLists, which automatically generates 'What's new'-indexes of different folders-- web publishing has never been so easy)

channel.euro.apple.com

ChannelNet is Apple Europe's new (yet to be announced) extranet for dealer communications. It is done by Netscape -- hand-coding html is a fact of life for them.

They delivered some templates for the ChannelNet site (all hand coded) and gave them to me at the beginning of a meeting. During that meeting, I put the templates into Frontier, automated them a great deal (reducing them from 33 files to 1 outline !) discoverd several errors in their code, and wrote a script that automates ChannelNet content production completely (all in one day).

At the end of the meeting, I demoed my stuff and am now developping a ChannelNet 'HTMLifier' for Apple Europe.(much like Content Server) This involves WebStar (http upload of raw files) and of course the mother of all scripting environments which guards over the integrity of the layout and of the html-links.

I am still looking for ways to automate the upload to the actual site (Netscape Publishing System), which must be done via http-upload (because of file-indexing requirements). If you have any suggestions...

http://www.holland.euro.apple.com/ (soon to be www.apple.nl)

This is the third site I take care of, which is currently a hybrid of classic HTML files and some Frontier based stuff. Pretty soon I will have completed the complete Frontierization of this site as well... then I'll take a vacation...

The only problem I have with Frontier, is that it is so incredibly exciting and powerful, I hardly get any sleep anymore...

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