Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

DreamWeaver, XML-RPC, and Frontier

Author:Philip Suh
Posted:1/20/1999; 12:42:30 PM
Topic:Frontier on MacOS X Server
Msg #:2326 (In response to 2309)
Prev/Next:2325 / 2327

This is a message I'm posting to the Dreamweaver-extending list. --

Hi, my name is Phil Suh, I do a lot of website automation development with a piece of software called Frontier (http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/). I've been lurking on this list because I'm interested in getting Frontier and Dreamweaver to work well together.

Frontier is a content management system that handles all portions of a web site in it's internal database, and then can 'cook' out static HTML files. (It does lots of other stuff as well). It has a bunch of great features that make it a no-brainer for large sites with lots of authors.

Frontier is a development environment--it's a great sandbox for geeks. However, it doesn't have a user-friendly GUI. Realizing this, the philosophy with Frontier has always been to integrate with the tools web builders use. For example, Frontier had a really tight integration w/ BBEdit 3.5 back in early 1997.

Anyway, the folks in Frontierland have long dreamed (!) of a great connection with Dreamweaver. Now with version 2.0, we're trying to explore ways to make that connection happen. We'd like Dreamweaver and Frontier to work together in a couple ways:

1. Use Dreamweaver to create/edit Frontier templates. Designers could go into Dreamweaver, use a menu to request a template from Frontier, edit it, and using the menu, send it back to Frontier.

2. You know how DW 2.0 can 'lock' certain parts of a page? We'd like to have a locked template that people could enter content into, and this time, from a menu command, send not the template, but the content. Basically using Dreamweaver as the pretty GUI to enter content into Frontier.

If you're still with me, let me explain how Frontier could talk to Dreamweaver. Frontier contains an HTTP server, and can parse and understand XML. It uses a very simple, easy protocol called XML-RPC (XML Remote Procedure Calls), which is really useful for cross-platform interapp communication. If there was a way for DW to do this, that would be really cool. (Frontier also supports AppleEvents and COM/WSH stuff, but a cross platform solution is preferred.)

Some questions:

1. Do Dreamweaver have an HTTP server or client builtin? (I know it does FTP.)

2. Could a HTTP DLL be written to get Dreamweaver to handle HTTP calls?

3. How hard would that be?

4. In what other ways could Dreamweaver send/receive data from other applications? ODBC, SQL, etc?

If you have any random ideas, I'd love to hear them. Thanks for reading.

Cheers- Phil

Interesting URLS:

Discussion group on Dreamweaver & Frontier: http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$2309

XML-RPC spec: http://www.xmlrpc.com/

James Spahr's suites.dream for Frontier: (important first experiments w/ DW & Frontier integration) http://www.panix.com/~jspahr/frontier/dream.html

What is Frontier? http://www.scripting.com/frontier5/whatIsFrontier.html

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