How UserLand's Frontier can revolutionize content management

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CONTENT MANAGEMENT
How UserLand's Frontier can revolutionize content management
By Russ Lipton

Some words from David Gewirtz
UserLand's Frontier is a fully-scriptable, object-oriented database tuned to support Web publishing. In this exclusive article, Russ Lipton shows you how by running Frontier cooperatively with Domino, you can give your end-user community a powerful content management application out-of-the-box.

We wanted to bring you this two-article series on Frontier (and its companion module, Manila) for a number of reasons. Frontier is a very interesting product we think you should be aware of. Russ Lipton, the author of these articles, has used both Frontier and Notes, making him uniquely able to help us all understand how the two products relate. We here at ZATZ have been using Frontier for a very long time (even before ZATZ was a company). We use it, in concert with our own ZENPRESS technology, to publish all our journals. And, finally, Dave Winer and the folks at UserLand are old friends and pretty brilliant product developers. It's always valuable to look at what they're creating. So enjoy these two articles and start thinking outside the box. -- DG

Why would DominoPower publish an article about UserLand Frontier, a groupware and Web server product that's not Notes and Domino?

Good question.

Here's the short answer: DominoPower's Editor-in-Chief, David Gewirtz, is a long-time Frontier hacker. ZATZ publications rely on Frontier for sophisticated content management. To see why, check out David's article at http://www.dominopower.com/issues/issue199808/whynot001.html in DominoPower's first issue.

"Frontier, running cooperatively with Domino, gives your end-user community a powerful content management application out-of-the-box."

But why should you care?

How about this: Frontier, running cooperatively with Domino, gives your end-user community a powerful content management application out-of-the-box. You can drop much of the intranet end-user hand-holding you might find in Notes while adding some really cool programmatic stuff that might not otherwise be possible.

I should be a bit more specific.

Making the Internet usable
Frontier is a decade-mature, fully-scriptable, object-oriented database tuned to support Web publishing (and has been Web enabled for the past five years now). Nearly the entire Frontier environment is exposed for scripting, so you can modify and tweak behavior and performance to your heart's content. Does that sound familiar, Notes hackers?

Frontier's author, Dave Winer, single-handedly defined the category of outliners in the 1980s with ThinkTank and MORE. More recently, he has co-authored key Web protocols such as XML-RPC (Extended Markup Language/Remote Procedure Call) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). IBM and Lotus have both made a strong commitment to SOAP while it also forms the foundation for Microsoft's .NET vision. Pure and simple, in my humble opinion, Dave Winer is right up there with luminaries like Tim Berners-Lee in making the Internet usable for mere mortals.