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Essential Blogging, Chapter 7: Advanced Radio UserLand

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Understanding How Radio Works

[The following is the conclusion of our series of excerpts from chapter 7 of the O'Reilly title, Essential Blogging.]

At its core, Radio is a very sophisticated piece of software-as sophisticated as you can purchase from any vendor today including Microsoft, IBM, and Sun. Here are some of the key components that make up Radio:

• Overall content management system

• Object database

• Scripting language

• Network engine

• Content publishing preprocessor

• XML engine

• Logical, consistent URL structuring

• SOAP and XML-RPC server and client engines

• Open architecture

Each component is discussed below. Please note that depending on your level of "geekiness," you may want to skip this section.

Overall Content Management System

The Radio blogging tool really began life as an earlier product from UserLand called Frontier, a powerful content management system (CMS). A CMS is designed to make web publishing much easier and more powerful. At the simplest level, a CMS isolates content from presentation. This lets you alter your web publishing with a few clicks of the mouse rather than hours or days of HTML changes.

For example, a CMS lets you globally change your web site's look and feel just by applying a theme or style to it. A CMS also lets you globally manage and fix broken links. If this sounds like Radio, you're correct-Radio is a full CMS and has features normally found in larger, more complicated, more expensive products.

Object Database

One of the problems with typical web publishing is the huge number of individual files involved. Radio's object database, the .root files it uses, takes care of managing all the files involved in your blog. Additionally, if you are a developer, you can use Radio's object database in your own applications where you need storage of variable length objects.

Scripting Language

Although it's not covered in this book, Radio has a full scripting language, UserTalk, which you can use to build custom applications. Much of Radio, in fact, is actually written in UserTalk. This means that if you need to change how a built-in Radio function works, you generally can. Additionally, Radio has a full development environment for UserTalk, including a debugger and a unique outline-based scripting environment. For more on UserTalk, see http://www.fuzzygroup.com/go/?usertalk.

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Created: October 21, 2002
Revised: October 21, 2002

URL: http://webreference.com/authoring/blogging/chap7/3/