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Frontier a la Neuberg Posted by Dale Dougherty, 6/7/00 at 3:50:39 PM. As reported in ScriptingNews today, Matt Neuberg's Frontier book, published by O'Reilly in 1998, is now online. It documents version 4.2.3 of Frontier on the Mac, which was available as freeware. The current commercial version of Frontier, available for Windows and Mac, is 6.x. Frontier is the foundation for Manila, which we use to publish weblogs like this one on the O'Reilly Network. While not completely current, Matt's book is still valuable as a way of learning the Frontier scripting language. Matt also continues to produce Dr. Matt's Tutorial on Frontier at drmatt.userland.com. His writing is very accessible to the non-programmer -- he really believes that anyone can learn to program, and a scripting language should make it even easier. Some of this can be explained by the combintation of Matt's interests in the classics and computing, which makes him a kindred spirit of quite a few editors at O'Reilly, including Tim. He also seems to have explored HyperCard and thoroughly enjoyed it as did I. (HyperCard often goes unnoticed as an important predecessor of the Web, but it also built with the expectation that anyone could learn to develop applications.) From his book's introduction: Frontier was not difficult. It was not, for example, anywhere near as hard as Ancient Greek, a subject I had for many years prided myself on being able to render crystal clear to anyone possessed of a willing determination to learn it. But learners of Greek did have a resource that learners of Frontier did not: reference books. There were Greek grammars, and Greek lexicons. For Frontier, there was almost nothing. What this program needed was documentation. It needed a teacher. I have read Matt's book, but through no fault of Matt, I didn't finish it. Manila became available about the time I was trying to learn Frontier and it seemed to remove the need to master the Frontier environment. Still, I like scripting languages, especially those that are easier than Perl to learn, and I have an outstanding obligation to learn Frontier someday. I'd like to be able to write scripts that extend the functionality of my Manila site. I wondered if Matt was using Frontier as the application framework for the online book. In his reply, he described how he converted the book, which was in FrameMaker, to HTML. Then created the site in Frontier. I used Frame to make all the HTML files, and then used Frontier to maintain and generate an overall stylesheet and to unite the site. I wrote a script that imports the HTML files generated by Frame; as it does so, it reduces them to what's between the Body tags. So now Frontier gets to put in the header and footer, and you get more of a Frontier site overall because you can make your own navigation (as you see). He also went on to explain some "boring" stuff about how he had to write a script to fix a problem caused by Frame's generation of HTML. Obviously he continues to teach.

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