Welcome to Frontier 5!

What is Frontier?

It's a Content Management System

Why Manage Content?

Form separated from content

Make it easy to change the look of a site

Keep the technical stuff out of the way of writers

Let designers work without having to deal with writers

Everyone works on what they do best

Three groups

Writers write

Designers design

Geeks keep everything working

Frontier is for the geeks

How does Content Flow?

Thru LANs, watched, shared folders

HTTP Put protocol

Email

Cookie-cutter or workbench?

No two organizations work the same way

You need a highly customizable environment to make it work

A cookie-cutter approach is a dead-end

Frontier is <i>designed</i> for customization

It's a website system workbench

Frontier is an environment

Everything is integrated

Much more powerful

Much higher performance

Key point!

The Object Database is the Center

Everything is built around a fast scalable object database

Millions of hours of burn-in

Hierarchical

It's also the symbol table for the language

The scripting language

Patterned after C, totally dynamic

No need for structure symbols, semicolons or curly braces

Because it's integrated with a revolutionary script editor

The script editor

Is an outliner

Expand a construct to see the detail

Collapse it to hide detail

When you move a statement, all the statements under it move too

This may be the single most revolutionary feature in Frontier

Complete script debugger

Set a breakpoint

Step into and out of procedure calls

Easily examine all data while a script is running

Object oriented website framework

Link management with hierarchical glossaries

Inherited and overridable attributes

Filter scripts also allow overrides and multiple content flows

All content is stored in database

The runtime environment

Full built-in TCP support via inetd

Fully supports client and server HTTP

Fully multi-threaded

Large comprehensive verb set

Background processes, agents

Semaphores

Editing tools

The object database editor is an outliner

Outlines are a great format for complex HTML

Simple text editor with easy HTML commands

Key Components of Frontier

Integrated database storage system

Object oriented website framework

Powerful scripting environment with development tools, debugger

Outliner and text tools

Link management

Multithreaded runtime

Comprehensive verb set

Frontier is content management

It's not an application development environment

It *is* a content management system

Suitable for a newspaper or magazine

A marketing department

A university department

A brief history of Frontier

Automated DTP production with Quark and PageMaker on Mac (1992-93)

Transitioned to the web in 1996

Ships 1/28/98 for Win32 and Mac

Websites are cross platform!

So are many utility scripts

It's the first truly cross-platform web scripting environment

A brief future of Frontier

Ease of use is our focus

Remote procedure calling

Sandboxes with scripted firewalls

Scalable content

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