First, a little taxonomy: LiveWire Pro is one of the six members of Netscape Communications Corp.'s SuiteSpot, which also includes your choice of Enterprise Server, Proxy Server, Catalog Server, News Server, and Mail Server. To this suite of five well-integrated engines, LiveWire Pro adds an online development environment. It contains a panoply of visual tools for creating and deploying live three-tier database applications and for managing Web sites with drag-and-drop ease.
A 60-day "test-drive" CD-ROM that contains LiveWire Pro and the rest of SuiteSpot is available from Netscape. To obtain a copy, you can either pay Netscape $10 plus shipping and handling or download it at no cost from Netscape's Web site.
Installation of the several components of LiveWire Pro (including the third-party applications bundled with it) across a network of NT workstations and servers was trouble-free. The manuals included with LiveWire Pro are well written and worth owning; they do a good job of easing your ascent up the learning curve. Especially helpful are the Developer's Guide and the JavaScript Guide, which include easy-to-follow examples of applications built with client-side JavaScript and server-side JavaScript (part of Netscape's answer to Microsoft's Visual Basic).
LiveWire Pro has three major components: Site Manager (with the LiveWire compiler), the LiveWire server extensions, and Netscape Navigator Gold (the premium version of Netscape). These components run in concert with Netscape servers and are packaged both separately and together with a Web server. A key feature of LiveWire Pro is the Database Connectivity Library, which enables direct SQL connections to databases from Oracle, Sybase, Informix, and Illustra, as well as ODBC connections to other databases, from desktop to mainframe. Database connectivity occurs via server-side JavaScript and the built-in Database Object that enables SQL queries to be executed from JavaScript embedded in a Web page.
There are actually two versions of this product: LiveWire and LiveWire Pro. LiveWire is the less expensive at $295; it operates on Windows 95 (for which Netscape recommends only 16MB of memory) in addition to Windows NT and Unix. But the high-end offering, LiveWire Pro, comes with a relational database (Informix-OnLine Workgroup Database) and a popular report generator (Crystal Reports Professional version 4.5, with new Web extensions). [Editor's note: Seagate Software recently began shipping version 5.0 of Crystal Reports. At press time, it was unknown if version 5.0 will be included with LiveWire Pro.]
Figure 1 presents an overview of these elements in the LiveWire Pro/SuiteSpot system that I used in my examination of LiveWire Pro.
LiveWire source files can contain either standard HTML or JavaScript embedded in HTML (with file extensions .html or .htm) or JavaScript functions (with the file extension .js). LiveWire compiles and links these files into a platform-independent bytecode "Web" file, with the file extension .web.
Taking full advantage of LiveWire Pro requires that you understand a little about JavaScript. It's an object-based language that Netscape has specialized to run at both the Web browser and Web server. Both the client JavaScript and the server JavaScript share a common basic syntax and library function package. But the prepackaged objects for the browser and server are entirely different. The client objects involve windows, frames, and documents, but no direct communications with resources outside the browser. In contrast, the server objects let JavaScript programs access disk files and databases.
Server functions are used for tasks that don't require client interaction, such as directing the flow from one Web page to another. Client functions are used for CPU-intensive tasks that don't require server interaction: for example, performing aggregate calculations (such as sums or averages) or other processing of data retrieved from the server.
JavaScript also has a group of predefined server objects, collectively referred to as the Netscape object framework. The LiveWire object framework is one of two LiveWire server extensions (the Application Manager is the other). This object framework provides an easy way to maintain persistent data using HTTP, which is a stateless protocol. Two important LiveWire capabilities are maintaining a distinct client state for multiple clients and maintaining a persistent application.
Client-side JavaScript is JavaScript embedded into HTML Web pages; it can only be executed by Web browsers containing JavaScript interpreters. Server-side JavaScript, on the other hand, provides a fairly easy-to-program alternative to slower CGI scripts. In fact, you can create an HTML page containing both server and client JavaScript statements, compile it to a LiveWire "Web" file, and install it on the server.
When you access such an application URL from a JavaScript-enabled Web browser, LiveWire dynamically creates HTML based on server JavaScript statements, sending HTML and client JavaScript statements to the client. The browser then interprets the client JavaScript statements, formats HTML output, and displays the results on your screen.
(For those wanting more information on this aspect of LiveWire, see the recently published JavaScript -- The Definitive Guide, by David Flanagen, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1996.)
The Application Manager displays all applications currently installed on the server in a scrolling list in the left frame. I used the menu to launch the sample program "world." Other LiveWire sample applications come with the product, and you can download an expanded collection from Netscape's Web site.
Lest you think LiveWire Pro is intended only for the largest corporations with extremely complex sites (it is well suited for such places, to be sure), I should mention that among Site Manager's 24 individual templates are templates for "The Person," "The Neighborhood Community Center," and "The Topical or Special Interest Group."
For developers, the LiveWire compiler -- another feature of Site Manager -- compiles server-side Java Script source code into LiveWire applications ready to run on any Netscape 2.0 Windows NT or Unix Web server. This compiler has selectible options for syntax checking and help, verbose output, displaying generated JavaScript content, and so on.
With the Crystal Web Report Engine, you can build applications that access information held in corporate databases and data warehouses and publish it in presentation-quality HTML formatted reports -- either predefined or dynamic.
When the Crystal Web Report Engine is installed on Enterprise Server, it utilizes Netscape's open-server API (NSAPI) and executes predefined reports on demand, sending results back to you, on the fly. This Web extension formats the report with the appropriate version of HTML for your browser. Figure 3 shows one such report, "Bytes per Hour"; others include "Top 40 Files by Number of Requests" and "Top 40 HTML Files by Number of Bytes." This type of information can be extremely valuable to technical and non-technical staff alike.
The version of Crystal Reports included with LiveWire Pro contains a new and most welcome feature: a custom data source driver that permits access to all of your Netscape Web Server access and error logs. This driver parses the simple text files that form the logs and converts fields to true date and number fields. I found this particularly useful in discovering usage trends that revealed opportunities for improvements to the content and configuration -- not only of the Web site but of the connected DBMS as well.
JavaScript is a raison d'être of LiveWire as a development platform. But JavaScript, still in its infancy, has bugs that sometimes flaw LiveWire. For example, the security holes found in Navigator so far often seem to involve the interaction of JavaScript with other features of Navigator, such as the special about:cache URL. Fortunately, the list of known bugs is well documented, and they're being corrected all the time. Technologies that support the Internet mature quickly -- they have to in order to survive; look for some significant improvements by the time LiveWire 2.0, now in beta, is released.
As a veteran OS/2 user, I was disappointed to learn that LiveWire Pro (and its parent SuiteSpot) did not run on IBM's Warp. But in September IBM indicated that although it will push Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino server as the preferred offering, IBM soon will announce an agreement with Netscape for a port of rival SuiteSpot to OS/2 Warp. Netscape confirmed this announcement.
I enjoyed working with this bundle of well-integrated applications. And as I became more familiar with it, I realized that the LiveWire environment could dramatically reduce several cost-to-benefit ratios in the enterprise. But, as I mentioned previously, some features of LiveWire Pro are geared towards the individual, family, or small organization. So my local chimney sweep, too, might consider this product: Compared to hiring a Web consultant to build and maintain his site (at around $100 per hour), the price of LiveWire Pro seems quite reasonable.
