NetObjects Fusion 5.0

NetObjects Fusion is an interesting study in the design and development of web page design tool. The initial inspiration came out of the 24-Hours in Cyberspace project, an early attempt at producing a document of life with the Internet. The web was a young place then, and the team running what was on of the first instant-publishing web sites realised they needed a tool to speed up site design and management. This resulted in a company, NetObjects, and a tool, Fusion. Designed to handle the development of complete web sites Fusion has been through four major releases. Now version 5.0 of Fusion has just appeared.

Fusion is designed to be a complete web site design package, and this latest release is targeted at the small to medium –sized business wanting to create an online presence. To help you get started NetObjects provides templates for two sites: a Company Internet presence and an internal intranet. Just click on the options, and Fusion will create a pro forma site. Once the site’s been built, you can then add a look and feel using Fusion’s easy to implement site styles. Using these means that any site created using Fusion will have a single look and feel on all its pages, as well as a standard navigation metaphor. Starting from scratch, or working with one of the Fusion templates, all you need to do is layout the structure of your site, choose a style, and you’re ready to start adding content – and even e-commerce features.

The library of site styles that comes with Fusion 5.0 has been toned down from previous versions. Instead of some of the more garish and irreverent images provided with earlier releases, the collection installed contains more subtle images and designs to go with the new business focus. You can still import styles from previous versions, so if you’re upgrading you won’t loose the look and feel that you’ve created in the past. You’ll also be able to create and add new styles of your own. These can be based on existing Fusion styles, or created from scratch.

If you’re using Fusion for it’s dynamically generated navigation bars and master borders, you’ll find version 5.0’s new customisable navigation tools useful. Instead of just giving you access to the pages on a specific level in your site, you can now add links to any page – both local and remote. You can also include download links to files, and email links. Whilst these may not seem to be big changes, they certainly go a long way to increasing the flexibility of Fusion’s site generation tools.

Fusion is designed to help you create dynamic web pages, and can add specific JavaScript actions to your pages. Every object on a page is associated with a series of actions, and like NetObjects BeanBuilder JavaBeans tool, these can be easily selected and implemented. For example, a layout object can have actions associated with it on page load. You don’t need to use the NetObjects pre-selected scripting options, as you can now add your own JavaScripts to objects.

Using the default actions it’s easy enough to build complex special effects, such as collapsible menus, or complex fades and wipes. You don’t need to know how to write Java scripts – just pick objects from the Object Tree, and choose what actions apply. We were able to build pages that displayed images on a button click in just a few seconds.

One problem facing the site designer is browser compatibility. Fusion gives a set of tools for generating HTML that is compatible with the major browsers. This really isn’t a tool for creating pages that will work with 2.0 and 3.0 browsers. Whilst Fusion will generate code suitable for earlier platforms, it’s best at working with 4.0 and better browsers, as it will take advantage of CSS and DHTML to give the best possible layout. The default technique is to use nested tables to create the layout, but if you know you’re targeting 5.0 browsers, then you can use CSS and absolute positioning.

When working with WYSIWYG web page layout tools you’ll know that a graphical layout is never enough, especially if you’re creating web applications. For more complex site and page designs access to raw HTML is an essential, and this is a function that earlier versions of Fusion were sadly lacking. With previous versions, pages had to be saved out as HTML before being edited I third-party tools like Allaire’s HomeSite. Once a page had been exported, Fusion could no longer work with the HTML in its internal WYSIWYG layout tools. However things have changed with version 5.0, and a new HTML source tab in the Page view means that you can use a page’s HTML document tree, and modify the raw code of your pages without having to work with external editors. HTML application developers will find Fusion’s Document Map tool a powerful guide to navigating their page’s HTML, showing exactly how their pages are put together. Using this you’ll also be able to edit JavaScripts, and see which objects in your pages they control. This is especially useful if you’re working with DHTML and the HTML document object model.

One of the more interesting new features in Fusion 5.0 is its Online tool. You’ll need to have Internet Explorer installed on your PC to use this. Click on the Online icon in the right of the Fusion window, and an embedded web-browser component takes you to a web site designed to hold program updates and to give you access to information and add-ons. It’s not as good as it appears though, as we found this to be rather slow – and in the case of a test copy of Fusion 5.0 installed on a standard corporate NT 4.0 workstation it was rather unstable. We’d hope that NetObjects improves this, as at first glance the project management tools in the site are going to be extremely useful to SMEs starting work on their first web site. Of course, you’ll need a permanent Internet connection to use this tool.

NetObjects uses an object-oriented approach to web site design and management. An object explorer is the most effective way of navigating around a page layout. The object-oriented model carries forward into its storage and back-up model. Instead of storing each and every page of your site as a separate file, Fusion uses a proprietary site database, the NOD file, to store page components and manage your site’s assets. We’d prefer this to be an open schema, with the option of using your own databases – or even an XML document. Until now, you had to regularly make copies of the site database if you wanted to be sure that you wouldn’t loose data in a crash. Fusion 5.0 will now create automatic backups – in any directory, local or remote -, so you’ll lose less work if a NOD file is corrupted, or your application crashes.

With many different web page and site design tools on the market, it’s important to distinguish between them. NetObjects Fusion 5.0 really isn’t a tool for web-page designers, unlike Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, which has recently had an upgrade to version 3.0. From the web-page designer’s point of view, Fusion’s site template and style driven technologies mean that it is a “fire-and-forget” tool. Designers can be used to create page templates and styles that can then be used by content specialists, or e-commerce front-end designers.

We were concerned to find reference in the documentation to connectors that would allow a Fusion site to include ASP, Cold Fusion and iCat commerce functions in a Fusion site. These were included with version 4.0, but appear not to be included in version 5.0 – instead they appear now to be available as third party downloads. There are also references to files on the CD-ROM that appear not to be present. We’d hope that NetObjects correct these inconsistencies as soon as possible.

Fusion 5.0 is an interesting evolutionary step in the development of an effective web page design tool. With NetObjects’ new focus on the small business market, Fusion 5.0 is now targeted at a specific audience that isn’t addressed by any other web design tools. It’s also suitable for users who are learning to create web sites. With Fusion 5.0 beginners can use styles and drag-and-drop layouts, whilst more advanced users can add third party components for e-commerce and access to application servers, as well as tweaking the raw HTML of their pages. It may not be another Macromedia Dreamweaver yet, but it’s certainly getting there.