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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 designed 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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