Session Description

Integrating object database systems with HTTP servers can provide a powerful backend processing and data manipulation system. In this session, we'll look at how you can use Frontier's object database with two emerging standards: IDIOM and MCF to build amazing CGIs and dynamic Web sites.

Technologies Overview

MCF

MCF (Meta Content Format) is an open format for representing information about content. The goal of MCF is to provide an adequate language for representing a wide range of information about content.

IDIOM

IDIOM is a standard for serving web pages, assembled on the fly from various objects in a database or on the file system. These objects have different attributes, or descriptions of what they are or what they do. Since it's tightly integrated with MCF, up-coming MCF-aware browsers will be able to take advantage of the information about different aspects of a web page (in other words, not just the raw text of the page, but what the text actually means, or how it's relevant).

Frontier

Frontier is a scripting environment developed by Userland Software that has an integrated database for storing scripts and other data items. This database caches some of its data in RAM as needed and therefore is extremely fast. Since the structure of the database is hierarchical, transitioning web content from the file system is convenient. Using the WebSTAR.root plug-in or IDIOM targetted to Frontier's ODB, you can serve partial or entire web sites dynamically from Frontier's database.