Chapter 1 Chapter 1Welcome to the Frontier User Guide, revised in June 1996 as a companion to Frontier 4.0. This manual describes the key features of the UserTalk language and the Frontier environment.
The manual has been completely reorganized to provide a logical path for learning Frontier. Entire chapters have moved, far-flung discussions of a single topic grouped together, new sections added, and outdated sections deleted. This version of the manual benefits from more than four years of watching people learn Frontier. Nearly every paragraph was reviewed for clarity, removing unnecessary text and inserting notes to emphasize key points.
Some scripting or programming experience is required to get the most out of this manual. It does not teach fundamentals such as variables, "for" loops, and "if" statements. Complete beginners can learn Frontier, but they must be willing to make an extra effort. Frontier is a rich and versatile scripting system; we believe the investment will be repaid many times over.
Following this introductory chapter, you'll dive right into Frontier in Chapter 2 with an explorer's guide to the inner workings and power of the product.Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 discuss the UserTalk scripting language.
Chapter 5 opens up the real power of scripting, showing how to customize, automate and integrate scriptable applications.
In Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, we describe the Object Database and other aspects of the Frontier environment.
Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 focus on controlling the Macintosh Finder and operating system, including with Frontier scripts that live on the desktop.
Frontier suites and agents are described in Chapter 10.
The User Guide concludes with a glossary.
Frontier 4 ships as a "fat" application, i.e. with both native PowerPC and "68K" code in a single file. It requires a MacOS compatible computer with a PowerPC or 68020 or greater processor, at least one megabyte of free RAM, a hard disk, and System 7.0 or higher.
Due to apparent limitations in HTML (as of June 1996), this document makes two departures from the standard. Feedback welcome.HTML has no accepted way to represent the "curly quotes" (typographer's quotes) that are part of the standard Macintosh character set. Frontier uses curly quotes as a convenient way to define a string that contains straight quotes, and vice versa. This document follows the convention of several Macintosh internet applications, mapping open-curly-quote to the HTML "superscript three" character (³), and close-curly-quote to "superscript two" (²). They are likely to appear on your Macintosh browser as curly quotes at the moment, but are not guaranteed to work in the future.
The non-breaking space character ("nbsp") is intended to keep adjacent elements on the same line. This document uses it for indentation in a "CODE" block.
Frontier is both broad and deep. This small manual is an introduction, nothing more. We believe there is a market for additional documention, ranging from electronic white papers with in-depth information on a specific topic to one or more complete books. We encourage authors to write the documents, and we encourage members of the community to support their efforts.Contents Page | Next Chapter -- Explorer's Guide to FrontierThe latest information on Frontier, including pointers to mailing lists, other websites and additional documentation, can be found at http://www.scripting.com/frontier/.