Sometimes, you just don't care about how or why something is done - you just want to get it done and move on. With Elemental Software's Drumbeat 2000, the how and why of Active Server Pages creation is dispensed with, and you're left with an incredible tool for quick design of database-enabled Web pages.
April 13, 1999
Drumbeat 2000 is by far the best ASP (Active Server Pages) development environment I've ever seen. That's a pretty strong statement, but after just 5 minutes with the product, I was hooked. So hooked, in fact, I dumped my copy of Visual InterDev from Microsoft (which I loved dearly).
So now that I've got your attention, I'm sure you want to know why I think so highly of it. In essence, Drumbeat 2000 is simplicity incarnate. The box makes the common marketing claim of "Building Powerful Web Applications Fast," and you know what? It really does. In less than 20 minutes from installation, I had a complete ASP-based Web solution ready for full production. It goes beyond fast and into the realm of mind-blowing. Not only was the first site I built with Drumbeat 2000 database-enabled, but it allowed for the adding, removing, modification, and full display of any database information I deemed it worthy to implement.
Drumbeat 2000 is not a simple WYSIWYG Web editor - far from it. Whereas Macromedia's DreamWeaver and Microsoft's FrontPage stress the actual layout and "prettiness quotient" of a site, Drumbeat is about database connectivity and page design combined.
The site wizards are excellent. Everyone has become accustomed to wizards which walk you through basic template creation, but Drumbeat's take you through some pretty heady stuff. Everything from basic page themes to full database content is covered. It's done so well, though, that even a neophyte to Web page design could probably be up and running in a few hours. No longer is a professional ASP coder needed for basic (and some advanced) designs. The wizards can make a beginner look like an intermediate user, and an intermediate user look pretty darned advanced. Simply choose either a blank site, or a "Drumbeat Starting Point" (a library of pre-built ASP solutions) and you're on your way.
The Drumbeat wizards ask very relevant questions, most important of which to me is "what browser are you designing for?" That's right, if you set it to design for one version of browser, or subset of browsers, it's going to custom-tailor its code output so as not to offend these browsers. Whereas other page editors simply test your final product for browser compliance, Drumbeat 2000 believes in complete enforcement of compliance by not building questionable code in the first place.
Drumbeat 2000 relies on the principle of recycling via its library of "SmartElements" and "Interactions." It comes with a complete library of reusable scripts, applets, images, and templates. So as to not confuse the non-programmer, general programming lingo is dropped in favor of friendlier references to these elements. Where one IDE might refer to something as an "event," Drumbeat makes it more obvious by calling it a simple "Interaction." If you're like me, this makes everything more understandable and friendlier to work with.
The page editor is much like a professional desktop publishing program (i.e. PageMaker or Quark Xpress). Simply dragging and dropping is not enough for this application. Custom, to-the-pixel precision can be demanded of it, and will likewise be offered to you. Templates, which I normally loathe the handling of in page editors, are incredibly easy to build and use in Drumbeat. You simply design a template, then, in the project window, you drag all your new pages on top of the template and voila! - instant reformatting of the new page to match the template's layout.
Data handling is, of course, the meat of Drumbeat 2000, and it handles it effortlessly. To create an ASP page you run through yet another series of simple wizards. The wizards first have you build an SQL data query via a point-and-click interface. From there, the wizard asks what types of data pages you need to build, choosing from search, view, update, delete types, or having you build them all. The wizard quickly generates the pages, which can be dropped onto any templates you may have built to customize them for a consistent look and feel across your site. Using SmartElements that are auto-generated by Drumbeat, you can add tools to enable sorting the data by whatever criteria you wish to make available.
Page editing, as I've mentioned, is performed through a WYSIWYG interface, which may frustrate those developers more interested in page layout than the data content. As Drumbeat uses its own language for creating a page layout, the only way I could find to edit the raw source code was to build the site, then, via the publishing wizard, convert it to actual ASP code. Using my favorite raw code editor (Homesite 4 by Allaire) I could rip into the ASP code after publishing it. Mind you, I'm not an ASP guru in any way, so most of my raw code work was to adjust layout, which was rarely necessary as Drumbeat 2000 handles page layout so well.
ASP technology is gaining ground quickly on the old standby of server coding, PERL. While PERL is far more flexible for general web-development, ASP is giving it a real fight for database connectivity. Although ASP is a Microsoft technology, Drumbeat, through the use of ChiliSoft Inc.'s ChiliASP, allows for development on multiple platforms, including Apache, Domino, and Netscape FastTrack server. Microsoft's own Visual InterDev 6.0, which is generally considered "the" tool for ASP development, can only develop for Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Go figure!
As a simple test of the capabilities of Drumbeat 2000, I tested it against a live SQL server in use at my office. Recently, we had an outside firm build an ASP version of our UNIX-based database system. While we are very pleased with the results, we really wanted to get our hands dirty with some ASP code of our own. Unfortunately, none of us are programming gurus, and we were quite worried about messing with things we shouldn't. Well, when I brought Drumbeat 2000 into the office, we had to try it.
For our first trick, we decided that we needed an ASP front end to our user tracking system. The goal was to produce a Web interface that would allow the lookup, addition, modification and deletion of user records from our main Microsoft SQL database. We knew Drumbeat would handle this well, we just didn't know how well. After about five minutes of answering the wizard's questions, we were done, and completely amazed. Not only had Drumbeat delivered the data as promised, but also it generated pages that were Netscape 3.0 compliant, something the system developers had been telling us was "not going to be fun".
Next up was an interface to our customer records. Same specifications as the previous, but we decided to pretty up the pages with a few graphics templates, and make them compliant with 4.0 and better browsers. Time to completion: eight minutes. Needless to say, I was on the phone ordering licenses for Drumbeat for the office a few moments later.
Drumbeat 2000 is my hands-down recommendation for anyone looking to create database-enabled Web applications. It should be understood however, that if you're going to get into really complex transactions with your database, you will need to have a strong understanding of ASP, and be ready to hand-code some of your own work. If you're just looking for a quick and easy way to make ASP pages that blow the doors off of what your competitors are doing, then it's time to look into Drumbeat 2000.
