Long ago (in Internet time), corporate Web sites were built by solitary Webmasters using only simple elements.

Today, state-of-the-art sites include dynamic Web pages whose contents differ depending on user choices and calls to high-end relational databases on the back end. Building such sites is a challenge; not only do you need to know HTML, but you also need a fair amount of technical knowledge about database access as well.

Elemental Software's Drumbeat 2.0 begins to address the gap between WYSIWYG Web design tools and more finely programmed Web sites. The product falls somewhere between Micro-soft's FrontPage and Visual InterDev in complexity and capability. Though not perfect, Drumbeat gives you near point-and-click development of basic database-driven pages.

One of Drumbeat's biggest strengths is its focus on a template-based approach to site building, in which content resides in a content table or database, separate from the page structure. It's easy to create a common subpage template and apply it to dozens of pages. Even nicer is the ability to create whole groups of pages using the concept of PageSets. After defining a common template, you can create a group of pages from a static content table or database query and thus give them a common look.

To aid in building pages dynamically, Drumbeat comes with a DataForm Wizard that allows you to graphically and manually create SQL statements for querying a database. The wizard provides basic page forms such as result, detail, update, insert, delete and search pages.

Drumbeat also provides a variety of predefined Dynamic HTML features and other page enhancements. Most page items are Smart-Elements that can be activated with a simple menu selection; for example, getting a logo to fly in takes just a few clicks. The various dynamic features are mostly JavaScript, but Drumbeat also supports Java applets, ActiveX controls, Scriptlets and plug-ins.

With the range of Web browsers in use today, the novice developer can get into trouble inserting content that doesn't work in all browsers. Drumbeat handles this problem by using SmartPages, which allow you to build a site whose pages vary depending on the browser used. At start-up time, Drumbeat asks you to indicate the browsers you want your site to support. The product supports sites built around any browser, termed "generic," Netscape 3.0-level browsers, Internet Explorer 4.0 or any 4.0-level browser. The point of the feature is to allow Webmasters to design for older browsers that have minimal or no JavaScript support, browsers with basic JavaScript support and those with advanced JavaScript and style-sheet features. A single page can have multiple versions that are managed logically as one, and the browser-specific pages don't have to be coded manually.

The process of building pages in Drumbeat is similar to that of many other Web development products. The editor positions page elements two ways: using tables for older browsers and with absolute positioning using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for newer, 4.0-level browsers. Drumbeat is one of the first development tools to focus heavily on the use of style-sheet technology in static pages. However, you need to preview your pages carefully; as with most WYSIWYG editors, it's possible to create pages that look one way in the editor and slightly different in a browser, especially given the differences in CSS support between Netscape and Microsoft. In general, Drumbeat excels at basic page layout and at positioning image, form and text elements. Compared with some editors, however, the tool is a bit too restrictive. For example, Drumbeat was not able to directly create a table with a row spanning two columns. The only way to insert such an item was by using a pass-through HTML feature that allows handcrafted HTML code to be added to the page.

With Drumbeat, you can begin building a site three ways: by creating a blank site, building a site based on a prebuilt template called a starting point or importing an existing Web site. If you're using SmartPages to route Web surfers to the appropriate version of a page, you must specify when you start the product how you're going to detect which browser they're using. You can use client-side detection via JavaScript or server-side detection via Active Server Pages (ASP). Drumbeat is geared toward ASP for server-side SmartPages, though it supports the Common Gateway Interface.

Because many sites are being upgraded rather than built from scratch, a key test of Web site development tools is how well they import existing sites. We found Drumbeat imported pages fairly well. In our testing, most page layouts were adequately preserved. However, Drumbeat cannot effectively import framed sites. While it can import the framed pages, you must recreate the frame structure. Furthermore, Drumbeat's current frame tool is limited to 10 common styles. While you can add new frame styles to the wizard by copying and changing some configuration files, this is less than convenient.

Another serious import problem is Drumbeat's inability to retain JavaScript code with pages. If the imported site has rollovers or form validation, be prepared to reassociate the scripts or even reimplement them. Fortunately, Drumbeat makes the creation of basic scripts easy.

The product's site import tool is too restrictive in the structure of sites it can import, currently limiting sites to a depth of three levels. Testing on an existing site with several hundred pages showed this limit to be unreasonable. Support documents on the World Wide Web indicate that increasing the import depth requires a change to the Windows registry.

Despite its limitations, the import tool has two ingenious features. First, it allows you to import site structure only and to build logical structure without content, so you can see how pages are logically interrelated without being distracted by the content. Second, Drumbeat allows you to insert remote pages that are not being updated but are part of the logical site. This trick, in conjunction with the ability to import just the structure, allows you to change a few pages in a much larger site tree while preserving the logical relationship between pages.

Beyond these features, Drumbeat is not well-suited for extremely large Web projects. The product lacks any sense of team-oriented features, integration with source code repositories or other content management systems beyond its own built-in asset manager.

Installation of Drumbeat is not difficult, but you may have more trouble configuring the necessary workstation and server database applications if they're not already set up.

Drumbeat accomplishes many incredible feats, such as browser-specific page handling, point-and-click page embellishments and automatic page generation with templates and database queries. It's a welcome advance over one-page-at-a-time tools for building Web sites with content tightly bound with visual design.

But like many Web development tools, Drumbeat still has a lot of rough edges. The tool is still best-suited for someone with specialized expertise in Web development and databases. In capable hands, Drumbeat can be a highly effective tool for visually managing and developing small to mid-size data-driven Web sites.

Originally published on Network World, Published: September 14, 1998.