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

Dave oh Dave

Author:Tom Fuerstner
Posted:10/12/1998; 7:38:53 AM
Topic:Suggestion: Explore the Calendar
Msg #:188 (In response to 187)
Prev/Next:187 / 189

Hi Dave,

You know I am an avid frontier user and developer. I am using it for years and actually togehter with my team at ORF ON we are using it for a lot of prototyping for our website. this site became meanwhile a real high traffic site with more than 80.000.000 hits per month and is therefor a top5 site in the german speaking website world. we have more than 2.000.000 pagevisits each month. Shortly said a site frontiers capabilities to do dynamic web publishing could do many things for.

Despite all these things i decided these days that we start to implement vignettes storyserver4 for several reasons. The most important reason is that frontier still lacks two features we need so much for rapid web application development. First the integration of SQL databases is still in the beta state. Event though we tried it hard under heavy load we had so many memory leak problems. Second the gui stuff is still, still a very neglected part inside the frontier environment. Doing webbusiness today means you have to be incredible fast and for this it is necessary that not so skilled people can work with you web publishing tool also.

Frontier is still the most flexible tool i know on the market but it is still not usefriendly and direct manipulation interfaces are a necessity today. You can not ignore it any more.

Beside this userprofiling and personalization are becoming more and more important and everyone doing high traffic websites needs publishing tools that function more and more as middleware tools that connect perfectly to tools like netgravity, doubleclick, opensesame, netperceptions etc.

I know that frontier offers me the flexebility to implement the necessary glue-functionality, but there is no time for a content provider to develop this kind of stuff. you need this functionality prebuild together with the right gui-tools to administer everything.

Appreciating frontier as a mighty middleware tool we started to develop prototyp-gui-interfaces on top of Swing and TCL/TK but decided that it is not worth the afford for us.

So finally we decided to go the vignette way.

My respect to you and your team,

Tom Fuerstner ORF ON Technical Director

ORF ON ist the internet division of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation a compony with a yearly return about 2 billion marks and about 6000 employees

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