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

Overview of Frontier 6 for Frontier 5 Users

Author:Dave Winer
Posted:3/30/1999; 8:13:32 AM
Topic:Sample code and utilities?
Msg #:4690 (In response to 4689)
Prev/Next:4689 / 4691

Preamble OK, since I mentioned it, here's the text from the Changes page for Frontier 6. I'd like to get it right. Do you have any questions about this? Does it address your concerns? Paul, does it work? We're really trying to do a lot better with docs, part of the holdup in releasing F6 is that I want to get Brent and Andre on track for filling out the docs while I take a much-needed vacation. You can help me right now, by guiding our effort. Perspective is important, our perspective is from the inside-out. We can't help that. But you can help us do better by focusing your mind on these issues right now, as you have, and help us present the information about the software in ways that are useful to you. Anyway, enough pre-amble, here's the changes intro. Overview In Frontier 5 we laid strong foundations in HTTP and XML. Frontier became cross-platform, with versions for Windows and Macintosh OS. And for the first time Frontier could manage dynamic sites, where rendering happened as pages are served. The goal of Frontier 6.0 was to complete the dynamic server, building in common features that benefit all sites, with an eye towards creating dynamic writing environments for people who work collaboratively on the web. As Frontier 6 progresses, thru 6.0.x and 6.1, the writing environment will build out and the server functionality will be improved. Bullets mainResponder. We wanted a single responder, mainResponder, that did everything, so we could get the details out of the way, details like membership, preferences, storage, discussion groups, virtual domains, subscriptions, a search engine, calendars, cookies, logging, news sites, file uploads. We wanted to be able to edit web pages in a web browser. We wanted an Edit this Page button. And we wanted to get to know the people who use our site. Frontier 6, thru mainResponder, does all this.Now we can be fully creative without having to reinvent the wheel every time we want to put up a new site. Compatible. While we went for maxium power and performance in Frontier 6, our overriding goal was full backward compatibility with websites built and managed with Frontier 5. Our goal was to leverage all that you learned about website management with Frontier into a new environment, the fully dynamic website. Dynamic. You may just want to use the dynamic features for testing your websites locally before uploading them to your server to be presented as a static site. Even in this mode, the dynamic features offer a productivity boost for Frontier-based web developers because you get such quick turnaround on your changes. And we are also excited about the idea of web content management applications that run privately on your system. We're already at work on applications of this new idea, as are other Frontier developers. Control. Another key goal for Frontier 6 was to give the system manager full control over the server. There are security features everywhere conceivable, and a new core table, user.databases, that makes it clear what code is executing and what files can be opened on your server. Logging is implemented at the core of Frontier 6, another key system manager control feature. A literate outliner. In order to have the foundation for a multi-user writing environment, we needed to improve the core text editor in Frontier, its outliner. The outliner has been improved in a very substantial way, headlines in Frontier 6 have virtually unlimited length, and as a result you can use the outliner to write much more than scripts, templates and specifications. The combination of structure and text editing in one window is uniquely suited to writing for the web, where structured HTML and XML tags can be intermixed with prose. The web is a structured text environment. Frontier 6 is the first software to fully tap this simple idea. Where we're going.. Having laid a strong foundation in HTTP and XML in earlier versions, and having Frontier running on Windows as well as the Mac, the next thing to do was to create the server environment we wanted to work in. That is Frontier 6. As we go forward, we'll build out the workstation, making it a great writing environment that completely taps the potential of a medium we love and understand, the worldwide web. And of course the writing environment will totally plug into the server environment, thru open standards, of course.





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