By Mark Gibbs
IntraNet, 12/16/96

Ambition is the shadow of a dream.' - William Shakespeare

The tool, called IntraBuilder, uses a heady blend of server-side JavaScript and databases to create HTML documents. Wrap that mixture in a typical Borland drag-and-drop graphical development environment, and you have a potential winner for intranet application building.

But Borland has brought this release, Version 1.0, to market too early. The product is stable (as in it didn't crash when I explored it), but it has too many holes to do Borland credit.

For example, the relationship between a form's layout in the Forms editor and its final appearance in a Web browser is frequently tenuous and usually unsatisfactory. While this is a common fault of many Web document editing systems, with IntraBuilder consistency seems even harder to achieve.

What's more, IntraBuilder's documentation is barely adequate. This makes learning the product rather difficult.

I suspect Borland's release of IntraBuilder is yet another example of the vendor community's lemming-like rush to move at the famed Internet-year speed (reputedly equal to five regular years) and to meet the market's belief that product development cycles can be effectively executed in a matter of months. Once again, we have to suffer release du jour.

Flippancy aside, Borland has what could become an excellent product. It has the potential to be a fabulous middle ground between the complexity of coding in Perl or C and the simplicity of most off-the-shelf Web server database systems. (When Borland turns the shadow into a dream, I will want - no, most probably need - this product.) Naked ambition Borland's IntraBuilder run-time environment, which is only available under Windows 95 or Windows NT, is architected so the IntraBuilder Broker is a back-end service to a Web server. The Broker provides the interface between the server and one or more IntraBuilder Agents - engines that run the JavaScript applications used for creating and receiving input/ output from Web browsers and for manipulating databases. The Agents can be run on additional copies of Windows NT, so you can distribute the processing across multiple platforms.

IntraBuilder works with a large number of databases, including the Borland Database Engine tables, DBF and DB files, Microsoft Corp.'s Open Database Connectivity-compliant data sources and a range of SQL database systems. Which ones are available depends on the product version - Standard, Professional or Client/ Server - you buy.

The broker interfaces with the Web server through the standard Common Gateway Interface (CGI), Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Server Application Programming Interface (ISAPI) or Netscape Communications Corp.'s Netscape Server API (NSAPI). In case you don't already have a Web server, all versions of the IntraBuilder package include the Borland Web Server. The Professional and Client/Server versions also come with Netscape's FastTrack Server (but for Windows NT only).

IntraBuilder Designer, the application with which you specify tables, forms, scripts and reports, is at the heart of the system. This slick application provides a highly structured framework for developing forms and entire applications. The application is written entirely in JavaScript.

Installation of the system from CD-ROM was a painless, 10-minute process. The setup program allows you to install IntraBuilder and the bundled copy of Netscape's Navigator Gold for editing Web pages. The Professional and the Client/ Server versions offer an option for installing the bundled Netscape FastTrack server.

I tried out IntraBuilder Professional using 'The Big Book Of How Many Does It Take To Screw In A Light Bulb Jokes,' as my data source. It's a collection of almost 300 riddles on the unlikely subject of repairing light bulbs. I tested the software using O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.'s WebSite Professional Web server. (WebSite is compatible with ISAPI, but IntraBuilder only allowed me to use CGI. Response is slower using CGI than it would be with a Web server configured with ISAPI or NSAPI.)

For the test, I ran Windows NT Advanced Server Version 4.0 on a 100-MHz Pentium board with 32M bytes of RAM in a Chatcom, Inc. Chatterbox Office Series 210-R server. For my client, I used another 100-MHz Pentium board with 32M bytes of RAM in the same machine connected by thin Ethernet. I used Microsoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 and Netscape's Navigator 3.0 browsers.

Ambitious start

I dropped the database, called Bulb2.dbf, into IntraBuilder's Samples subdirectory, and then in Designer selected the Tables tab and then the database. From there, you can create new tables and examine them in Table or Table Design mode. These modes allow you to browse and edit the table data and modify the table's structure, respectively.

I switched to the Forms tab and selected the Untitled form, which automatically runs a wizard that helps you specify the data source and attributes for the new form.

It is at this point you start to get an inkling of some of the product's problems.

Problems

As the programmer, it would be good to have control over the way tables are used, but the actual translation from the Designer representation to HTML is done internally to the IntraBuilder Agents. There is no HTML template or accurate layout control. I suspect once you get experienced with IntraBuilder you'll find a way around these problems, but your choice of form layouts will be limited.

My biggest gripe is with the search facilities.

The default for IntraBuilder only allows searches for the target text starting from the left-hand end of fields. For example, if a field contains 'blue angelfish,' a search for 'blue' will succeed but 'angelfish' will not. This is bizarre! Why would anyone want or expect such a limited feature? And will users understand the limitation? No, I don't think so. Actually, this problem has a workaround that requires modifying the SQL search logic defined in the form. However, Borland's helpful product manager couldn't give me the code off the cuff (or, even for some weeks after finishing this article).

Other similar problems are littered throughout the product. They include poor error message texts that really aren't helpful to great voids in the documentation that make it difficult to get inside the product and exploit its strengths.

Programming

Some of the attributes when modified actually add JavaScript to the client-side form rather than the server back-end processing. This can be extended to allow the client-side form to be sophisticated in things like data validation and the way that forms interact with the user. You also can include Microsoft Corp. ActiveX components.

Borland has extended the JavaScript program with its own classes to provide functions that support its IntraBuilder environment. However, the documentation was not available at review time.

Dream to product