Radio Userland Explained

Content-wire gets a hand held tour of Radio Userland


11 June 2001, 11 am GMT

A few weeks ago we heard that Radio Userland, a new web publishing utility, was kicking off.

Despite some experience and average IQ, we had some trouble positioning the tool, and we were left with some questions.

Last week a guy who seems to have some brain under his belt admitted having similar conceptual barriers, so content-wire felt less embarrassed about the simplicity of some of our questions.

John Robb, President and COO of Userland Software shares his knowledge with our readers, and goes through some of the points taken from the product literature and explains their relevance and usefulness to the readers.

Check out some of the tech acronyms in our glossary.

“It is really easier to understand Userland if you look at Manila as our content management system and Radio as our personal weblog and newsreader tool”

So, let’s go through the points your press release makes:

“Radio Userland is a full web application development and runtime environment”


What?


Radio is primarily a desktop weblog tool and news reader. Here is a little more information about our development environment.

Frontier began as a development environment, the first application built for it was Manila our browser-based content management system.

With Radio we built a lightweight version of frontier that runs on the desktop pc.

The first application that runs on it is Radio.

Frontier has a scripting language (which is a high level programming language), a script debugger, a run-time, an object database, and http (web) server, and hooks to Xml-rpc and Soap. It is sometimes hard to understand the difference between the platform and an application when a platform is new.

Frontier is a platform. Radio and Manila are applications. We have other companies that build applications in frontier right now. Remember, Microsoft's platform was hard to distinguish from its first apps since the applications were the place you spent 100% of your time. Only after other developers began to write new apps for the platform, it became easy to distinguish between the two. Frontier is our platform for next generation internet application development. You can build an application in Frontier that easily hooks up to Soap services (for example: a Soap service could be the calculation of a stock's price to earnings ratio.

An application built in Frontier can send a request for the p/e ratio of Yahoo across the internet to the dow jones soap p/e ratio calculator, the dow jones soap service would calculate the p/e ratio and send it back to the application in xml) soap radically simplifies the ability of a developer to build very complex web applications.

With a sufficient number of Soap services available from Dow Jones, I could build a very complex financial tool in Frontier in a short period of time. On top of that, since Manila is bundled with Frontier, I could use Manila's content management capability to easily manage a complex website that contains all of this functionality.


“It puts an industrial-strength web server on your desktop”


Please expand, what functionalities exactly?


This is a new concept: a web server on the desktop.
This opens up two new worlds:

1) you can publish a weblog from your desktop. This is very p2p.

2) you can build applications for the desktop that suck in data using soap and display the results via a website on the desktop.

A desktop website massively simplifies interface development. Web pages are easy to build. Windows interfaces are not easy to build. A desktop website is also fast. Human productivity drops off after a second of delay. Most remote websites take 4-5 seconds. Some more than that. A desktop website provides you a web page in under a second.

“Applications run in the browser”


As opposed to run on the server?


No. The interface is the browser. The apps are on the desktop with radio. They are on the server with Frontier/Manila. A browser is a great interface. People know how to use it. Web pages are easy to build. It is a much better solution than coding everything to windows.



“Server software and data are on your system. Because Radio supports xml-rpc and Soap 1.1, you can run software that links into new distributed xml-based networks, being created by developers on all platforms, in languages such as Python, Perl, Tcl, Visual Basic, Php and Applescript. Even C, Java and Microsoft .net software can wire up to the radio desktop over the internet”


Can you explain the advantages of this?


1) it is fast. You only ask for data rather than a complete webpage.
2) it is powerful. You can get access to all of the databases and applications in the world. If i want to do an analysis of historical stock prices on several stocks and there is a soap services that does this for me, i can access that service, even though it is halfway around the world. The results are returned to me in xml.
3) i can store the data i get in a desktop database. Since it is in xml i can put it into any template or format i want (this is the secret of good content management systems: the separation of content from templates). Data in xml lets me do anything i want. Data in a webpage is hard to use. I can only read it as it was formatted by the publisher.


Userland played a leading role in developing the new standards, along with microsoft, developmentor, netscape and ibm.


You mean Radio is a standard?


No, it will be the next major desktop productivity application (the only one that Microsoft doesn't own) ;-)

Userland played a leading role developing Soap, Xml-rpc, and Rss (the syndication standard for headlines).


“Radio comes with a built-in application that streams news from authoritative publications such as Red Herring, Wired News, Salon, Cnn, Reuters, the San Jose Mercury-news, Motley Fool, Internet.com, and from weblogs such as Tomalak's realm, Applesurf, Slashdot.org, xml.com, freshmeat and scripting news”



Okay
So if i am a content provider;
How do i get my news streamed?
To whom?
How do i make money out of it?


If you built a desktop website in Radio you can distribute your content for a lot less than from a conventional website. The only real problem with content business models online is that it costs way to damn much to build and maintain a website. You need lots of servers, you need lots of bandwidth, you needs lots of techs. It costs way to much to do this for the money you get from advertising and subscriptions. Radio allows you to get rid of most of this expensive distribution architecture. You can build a desktop website in radio and distribute your news and content as data to your readers.

On top of that, the experience is better. When the reader clicks on a page, the new page is there in less than a second. If they click on a audio or video file it instantly plays because it is already there!

A final advantage is that you can make the connection between you and your reader two way. Radio is a publishing environment.


“Radio isn't just for reading news, it's also an easy web writing tool. If you've been using blogger or manila it will be familiar, and it's integrated with the news streaming feature (described above) and can sort news into categories for people in your organization and internet-based work groups. One person can easily manage dozens of output channels with our simple checkbox-based categorization interface”


Okay but:
Where are the channels published to
Can i control who access them
And