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October 1998 Report
Building Online Applications
Demo and a Special Guest
Here's a Quick summary of our October meeting. The meeting was held on October 28, 1998. Around eight people attended (I'll not list names for fear of skipping someone who was there...)
We discussed our topic of 'Building Online Applications' by doing a case study of a recent Online Application that had been built in Frontier. Then we spent our time chatting with our special guest from Userland.
Online Application Case Study
Once again I demo'd a bit of work that I had done recently.
Problem: A team of web designers (let's call them GO) was overhauling their client's website. The client had a large site, and also an internal web team to handle content. The problem was, as GO's team reworked the site's structure, look, and feel, the client's web team wanted to work on the content. Both teams needed to be able to share content without overwriting each other's changes.
Solution:
- A server running Frontier would manage all the content.
- All of the content would be stored inside of a Frontier ODB.
- Team GO and their clients could check out and edit information on a page, without trampling on each other's work.
- The browser interface was used for checking out items, and items could be checked out via email, ftp, or directly edited on the web.
- A heavily customized rendering process allowed flexiblity in page rendering and output options.
- Users could view a page, check it out and edit it, preview, and then publish the page to the live server.
- All of this ran in a thread-safe environment.
- Web-based administration.
Each page was broken up into 2 or more sub-parts, called assets. Frontier was able to manage all the content on the asset level--check in and check out, display, preview, and rendering. A unique customization of the page renderer was developed, allowing each asset to have it's own template (called a stencil) that would work inside of the page's template. And each page would generate up to 4 output files.
Implementation: Frontier 5.1.3 running on a Mac behind Quid Pro Quo. The content management system was rolled by hand; security built on top of the People and Custody suites; the web interface was CGI-based. Macros implemented the multi-part renderer.
What was good:
- Because all the data was kept inside of Frontier, Frontier was also able to manage production of pages.--this helped tremendously on the tight schedule that we had.
- Numerous features were added to the content management system--logging, search, security, access levels, etc.--as we went along.
- The system was flexible enough to adapt to the changing needs of the project.
- It saved the GO team from having to edit and track thousands of text files by hand.
- It was able to handle the amount of data--about 3,000 pages with over 12,000 assets.
What was bad:
- The development/debugging process for the CGI interface was time-consuming and tedious.
- Because of the tools available at the time, our search engine was so slow as to not really be usable.
- And the large amount of content (50 megs+) was awkward to manage and backup; in particular, it was difficult to update and maintain the database while in use, making for some late nights of caretaking the database.
Ironically, almost all of these problems were fixed by Userland during and immediately after the project. The releases of 5.1.4 and 5.1.5 add features I wish I had had--the main responder in 5.1.5 would be much easier than CGI's; there were new search features unveiled in 5.1.4; and guest databases are finally ready for prime time.
Notes: It took a lot of work, but the project was a success. This project allowed frontier to show off it's strongest features--interapplication communication, web page publishing, and the ability to store and manage any kind of data. Personal notes:I used the final filter for the first time in my life! It was great to work on a project with another Frontier developer, Tom Clifton.
Special Guest: Userland's Bob Bierman
We were really pleased to have Userland's Bob Bierman come to our meeting. Bob was the one who did most of the coding for the Windows port (correct me if I'm wrong about that!). He wears two hats at Userland: while he still does programming, he also is in charge of business development and oversees sales of the product.
Bob came just as a guest but wound up demoing a few COM-related features for us. He demonstrated how to use VBScript and COM to link Microsoft Word and Frontier on his Windows laptop. He demo'd editing a Frontier wp text object in Word, and saving it back into Frontier via just a menu command. This is particularly exciting for those who know about the currently Mac-only "Edit With App" feature. It looks like that feature is now possible on Windows as well.
More than just a new feature for Windows, this demo showed that Frontier will--and is--able to integrate with Windows apps, and that we're closer to the dream of cross-platform interapplication communication, with Frontier as the glue in the middle, holding it together.
Bob does great demo, and the majority of the time we just chatted with him about new and future features. I think most present were mightly pleased to be able to talk to a Userland person in person, to hear more about the future of Frontier.
Thanks for coming Bob!
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