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This is Frontier: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuburg, unabridged and unaltered from the January 1998 printing.
It deals with the freeware Frontier 4.2.3; for commercial Frontier 8, look here, and for the inexpensive Radio UserLand, look here. See my Web site for information.
Those wishing an offline or printed copy may purchase the book, which is still in print.
Copyright 1998 O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reprinted with permission.

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NEXT: ToDo List

VI

Applied Frontier

Earlier sections have described what Frontier is; the question now is what to do with it. Frontier is a tool for building tools; what those tools should do is up to you. But you do not have to build all your own tools from scratch; many have been included in the Frontier database. In fact, many users come to Frontier explicitly to take advantage of these included tools.

Some of the tools are small and simple, little more than illustrations or suggestions of the kind of thing you might have Frontier do. But others, such as Frontier's famous Web site management facilities, are powerful, flexible frameworks whose functionality rivals that of commercial programs.

In this section, most of the included tools are described. You can use them "straight out of the box," or let them serve as inspiration for further UserTalk programming of your own. Frontier is an open system: the UserTalk scripts that lie behind these tools are there for you to study.

The section starts with some basic tools, the ToDo List and the Scheduler, before proceeding to network-related materials. Frontier's abilities to serve as a TCP/IP client or server application are described, and there is a chapter on NetFrontier, which lets copies of Frontier talk to one another across an AppleTalk or TCP/IP network. Then the use of Frontier as a CGI application is explained, and, at long last, we'll examine the Web site management tool that lets you construct and manage Web sites of any desired size and complexity. Finally, CGIs and Web site management are combined to make dynamic Web sites, sites whose content changes automatically over time or in response to commands given through Web pages.

These tools are all suites. On how a suite is implemented, see Chapter 26, Menus and Suites.

Besides the tools included with Frontier, there are many others written by users all over the world and available on the Internet. Space and time don't permit these to be documented here, so your journey of discovery is only beginning. As you become an adept UserTalk programmer, you too may contribute to the ever-growing library of Frontier tools.