I've been working with Frontier for about a month. I wish I had persevered when I dabbled with Frontier a year ago, I could have been so much more productive when I began my new job.

Why do I use Frontier? Well, the number of reasons will increase as I gain experience and get ideas, but here are two concrete ways it is helping me now.

Literature Search Agent

I'm learning Frontier and web page authoring contemporaneously. In a fairly short time, I have assembled a useful agent script that keeps tabs on the database of scientific literature maintained by the National Library of Medicine at the NIH. This database can be queried by http, and the published API includes a multitude of parameters for specifying the search and output format. Scripted access from Frontier is straightforward.

I maintain a table of query strings for genes undergoing study by different scientists, as well as personal items relevant to my research group. Every day at 2 a.m., Frontier queries the database looking for new entries, and the output is parsed and funneled into Frontier's website framework for rendering and ftp. The URL containing the day's hit(s) is then emailed to all members of a distribution list.

With this system, I can ensure that new and interesting genes encountered in casual reading of the journals do not "fall through the cracks". Since, the database search engine is told to look only 1 day back in time, the daily reports are not too long. Once I learn the server aspects of Frontier, I will permit users to add their own queries to the list via a web form.

Setting this up taught me a lot about scripting in general and the website framework. Now I can painlessly let Frontier do the work.

Website Management

We have a large set of project documentation that must be published on our intranet. Many different people carried out the research work, and we all have basic knowledge of html. Rather than publish a hodge-podge of different authoring styles, I volunteered to oversee this project so that the pages have a consistent appearance and contain hierarchical navigation links. I never would have made such an offer if I hadn't seen what Frontier can do for website management. I generally avoid too much gobbledy-gook on my web pages, but the smart navigation links (like Seth's SiteLiner) are both cool and eminently useful. The banner/sidebar structure that was apparently dreamed up by Brent is also very effective.

Mike Myers, PhD
Bioinformatics