People who have been working with Frontier websites for some time may remember a suite I developed called SiteBuilder around the time of Frontier 4.0.
This was a suite designed to make working with Frontier websites easier and more powerful. It was a big hit, and I get mail today from people who still use it (even though it has been unsupported for some time). Dave Winer asked me to help out some with the development of Frontier's web building framework for the 4.1 release of Frontier. A bunch of ideas made it into that release and a bunch didn't, either because we ran out of time, or Dave didn't see them as being as useful as I did.
I took this list in the summer of 1996 and just started adding to it whenever I had an idea. I figured I would take this list and build a new version of siteBuilder with it to work with Frontier's HTML framework.
But when I went to do this, I saw that without modification to Userland's core framework, I would have to use a lot of complex workarounds, and in other situations there would be no way to do what I wanted to do. When I looked at the amount of work needed for these problems, I realized it would be easier to start from scratch. I had also strongly considered doing the project in something other than Frontier, but there were still many reasons to stay inside the Frontier environment.
And so the RingMaster project began to build a system with all the power of the HTML framework and more, but with the ease of use that was the hallmark of SiteBuilder. The main goals were:
A Framework where any web file has equal status, not just an HTML framework A system that was user extensible without needing changes to the core framework A framework that allowed rich meta data to be able to be attached to objects in the framework A system that would allow complete multiuser interaction without the use of Frontier on every client.
8/11/1998:
Work continued on and off for 2 years, with a conversion to Frontier 5.0.
Then in the late 5.0.2 beta process, the verb string.processHTMLmacros was broken with the claim that it was never supported. Frontier was also released as a commercial product with its focus being the web. I figured that this application was getting too complex for Frontier also, and felt that it would be silly to advocate an alternative to the HTML framework, no matter how much more superior when Frontier itself was being sold as a web tool only (as opposed to a scripting tool).
So I now decide to release this package as is to the community. I retain copyright over all code, but am willing to have others take on this project if they feel there is a reason to (I don't recommend it myself). For advanced scripters there are lots of interesting concepts I explore, and if you have the time and patience there is a lot to learn from this source code. Finally the features that are already working here are some often requested by users, and the fact that they are possible may allow users to again request them from Userland.
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