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May 3, 1999

Drumbeat Offers Improved Web-Site Development Tool

Upgrade improves user interface and data access

By Steve Gillmor

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eb-authoring tools usually force users to make a choice between power and ease of use. Elemental Software Inc.'s Drumbeat 2000 slips neatly in the middle, delivering both WYSIWYG site design and advanced data access tools that leverage Microsoft Internet Information Server and its Active Server Page (ASP) engine. This product can change the way your company develops Web sites.

This release improves on Drumbeat's innovative technologies--point-and-click code generation, design template inheritance, and re-entrant data wizards--with revamped documentation, a more coherent user interface, and an attractive price.

Drumbeat 2000 adds support for parameterized queries and stored procedures, Visual Basic script for server-side interactions and scripting, and wizards that automate site creation and publishing. More important, Elemental has carefully enhanced Drumbeat's core technology to enable it to assemble complex sites without requiring the developer to have programming expertise. The Quick Start guide methodically introduces key Drumbeat constructs such as SmartElements, point-and-click interactions, and the DataForm Wizard, letting you construct a data-driven site with dynamic drop-down lists, input validation, and SmartPages that display pages differently based on which browser the viewer is using.

Drumbeat's user interface has been overhauled. The Interactions Center replaces Drumbeat 2.0's ungainly cascading menus; you can filter the list to show interactions created for a specific browser, show all interactions on a page, and right-click one or several design elements to view possible interactions. Drumbeat combines each of a SmartElement's properties with prewritten JavaScript functions to generate the appropriate underlying code when the site is published. Drumbeat authors can choose from a library of more than 100 interactions that include new support for server-side COM and ASP objects.

Drumbeat's Template Manager lets you drag and drop pages to inherit common elements from a cascading series of templates. This tool goes well beyond competing packages such as NetObjects Fusion and FrontPage in flexibility--and fixes several annoying problems in the previous version. Styles can be inherited at the container or content level, so that link colors, for example, remain consistent from page to page.

Drumbeat SmartPages let you take a page and convert it into separate pages that are optimized for different browsers. Drumbeat generates redirection code that detects the visitor's browser and returns the correct version of the page. Drumbeat lets you convert SmartPages back to normal pages; you can also create Element Collections that collect SmartElements, relative positioning, interactions, and content into a new SmartElement. You can then register and install the new object on the SmartElement toolbar and use it among multiple sites.

Drumbeat 2000 comes with a suite of Starting Points (base projects with specific objectives), including publish settings, templates, media files and folders, styles, custom scripts, database connections, and SmartElements. IT managers can create their own Starting Points or customize supplied ones, including Employee Directory, Corporate Asset Management, Events Management, Guest Book, and Corporate Intranet.

Elemental has overhauled Drumbeat's DataForm wizard. You can display multiple records on a page with the new Looper SmartElement, add drop-down lists, check-boxes, and radio buttons, and filter the results from one recordset by the selection in another set of data. The wizard can automatically create new detail, search, update, and insert pages, or select an existing page from your site structure. The wizard also retains any existing elements when you make data-source changes.

Drumbeat 2000 still has limitations--framesets aren't imported correctly, centering and relative positioning aren't supported, and there's no provision for Visual SourceSafe or other check-in/ check-out team tools. I had some trouble migrating an existing site to the new release; rollover buttons and some link styles required re-editing, and I needed a Drumbeat service pack to patch some publishing inconsistencies. But Elemental's advanced developers have contributed an expanding library of interactions, SmartElements, and code libraries that make sophisticated ASP development accessible to a much wider audience.

IT managers can add a new kind of Web author somewhere between Office 2000 users (saving files as HTML to Web folders) and Visual Studio developers (building n-tier applications on the Web). Ordinary users can use Drumbeat to create sophisticated Web sites with a minimum of training. Low-end authors working with Fusion, DreamWeaver, and FrontPage can add Drumbeat to the mix to improve their productivity. And high-end Web developers can enhance Drumbeat's point-and-click interactions to reflect business intranet standards and best practices.

Steve Gillmor is director of Southern Digital Inc., a Charleston, S.C., IT consulting firm; he can be reached at sgillmor@southerndigital.com.