From TidBITS#328/13-May-96
From TidBITS#328/13-May-96Exerpted with permission from TidBITS#328/13-May-96.
Frontier 4.0
Almost a year ago, Dave Winer turned the high-end Macintosh scripting system UserLand Frontier loose on the net in the form of "Aretha," a codename for a net-savvy version of Frontier. (See TidBITS-279_.) Last week, Dave did it again, with the "official" release of Frontier 4.0.
http://www.scripting.com/frontier/
It's not much of an exaggeration to say Dave lives for scripting, and once again Dave has re-purposed and re-targeted Frontier, this time squarely at Web publishers and service providers. Frontier 4.0 provides extensive hooks into WebSTAR, FileMaker, Netscape, Internet Explorer, and other applications to facilitate creation of custom content and Web publishing solutions. Moreover, Frontier 4.0 now offers Web site management capabilities - the basic idea is that your "source" files for a Web site reside within Frontier. When you want to change your site, Frontier "renders" and exports the HTML for you, even to the extent of uploading the files to your Web server. Frontier can make it easy to create and manage vast, consistent Web sites, and Frontier extensively ties in with BBEdit 4.0 for HTML processing and authoring. Moreover, for CGI developers, Frontier offers native, multi-threaded performance, and Frontier's UserTalk is still an OSA language, so AppleScript developers could even think of Frontier as a giant set of OSAXen.
Frontier still isn't for the faint of heart: Frontier scripts can be indecipherable to non-programmers, and even experienced developers have historically had problems diving into Frontier, even with the free Aretha releases. Frontier 4.0 goes some distance toward addressing these concerns, with an entire Frontier Users Guide now available online, along with various Frontier tutorials and walk-throughs contributed by users, covering CGI scripting and other topics. Also, the Frontier user community can be extremely helpful - check out the Frontier-Talk mailing list if you're interested in learning what Frontier can do.
http://www.scripting.com/frontier/docs.html http://www.scripting.com/frontier/mailinglists.html
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This page was last built with Frontier on a Macintosh on Sun, May 26, 1996 at 1:21:59 PM. Thanks for checking it out! Dave |