Frontier

Using Frontier

Extending Frontier

adding favicons

migrating websites

Using CSS

Fixing Radio 8.1

Fixing Frontier 5

nextPrev broken

err log sans timestamp

temperature conversion

our WebRing

This site is created with Frontier. Frontier, by UserLand Software, is a content-management engine that gives me the ability to separate what I want to say on my web sites (the content) from how I want the sites to look (the form).

The Ups

What sets Frontier apart from the herd of web page tools is the integrated programming language. UserTalk lets me extend and enhance the capabilities of Frontier as I see fit. It also allows me to leverage the contributions of a worldwide community of programmers who are hell-bent on making Frontier do as much of the mechanical automated work of website management and maintence.

Frontier is cross-platform, currently running on Mac OS and several variants of Windows.

In a nutshell - with important terms boldfaced - this is how Frontier does its work: content is rendered through a template (which defines the look and feel of the resulting page). Hypertext links, whether internal or external, are looked up in a glossary (a centralized store of URLs). Glossaries, and in fact all other Frontier attributes live in a hierarchy (making it easy to customize facets of the rendering environment). The rendering engine parses the content, looking for UserTalk, present in the form of macros, which it computes (giving you a complete programming language inside your web pages).

The Downs

Frontier (at least version 5.0.2b20, the last free release) suffers from several problems, as I see them.

While the Frontier application program is cross-platform, that is to say it comes in Macintosh and Windows versions, the data file that contains your web site data (typically called Frontier.root) also has platform-specific information, and can't be transparently moved between platforms. Some operations can be done from either platform, but some functionality is hidden to you or broken, should you try and open a Mac-created Frontier.root from Windows or vice-versa. The Frontier.root should be freely transportable between operating systems.

Since the Frontier.root can become quite large, especially for graphics-intensive web sites (since all the images are stored within it), moving it between machines (especially if one is at home and the other at work, with a modem between them) isn't a particularly attractive option. A better one is to move a portion of the hierarchy; exporting it from one machine and importing it to another machine (and back again when the work (or the day) is done).

Unfortunately Frontier's exporting mechanism suffers from crippling memory problems, making it damn near impossible to export even a small part of my web hierarchy without running out of program memory. For me, in my role as webmaster working on multiple platforms, this is the most deficit in Frontier.

My last complaint about Frontier is the use of an "integrated database", the Object DataBase (ODB). The ODB is a view into data in exactly the same way as is a file system. Keeping Frontier's data in a hierarchy of files instead of a proprietary ODB would lessen the Frontier's susceptibility to corruption by leveraging decades of work by others in keeping file systems hale and hearty. Problems with cross-platform compatability and memory problems while exporting would immediately go away too. Frontier "databases" could then be shared in exactly the same way other files and folders are shared on your operating system. All that would be required is a check-in/check-out system among the group given write access to the hierarchy.

Where can I find out more about Frontier?

After you check out the Frontier resources on this site (the navigation links at left) I suggest you venture over to the Userland Frontier WebRing, where independent efforts of the Frontier and UserTalk communities may be found.