If you're already familiar with LiveWire, you might want to skip the next section. If you're new to LiveWire, you'll have to learn how to use it by reading Netscape's documentation and/or available LiveWire books. However, for LiveWire newbies, the following section briefly describes the tool and its uses. It also gives a brief explanation of the difference between using LiveWire and using the database publishing features in NetObjects Fusion 2.0.

A primary use of LiveWire is to build web applications that access external databases running on UNIX and Windows NT servers. LiveWire supports the following databases: Informix, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and Sybase. It also supports any products you can access under Windows through an ODBC driver (including Microsoft Access and Excel). The difference between using LiveWire and the database publishing features that are included in NetObjects Fusion 2.0 is that LiveWire allows an application to access a live database dynamically, while a web application is running. The database publishing features in NetObjects Fusion let you generate a set of web pages from database tables, but this is done statically, at a given point in time, rather than dynamically, as a site visitor? interacts with a LiveWire application.

In addition to LiveWire's great utility as a web database-access tool, it offers other features that are useful in addition to, or independent of, its database connectivity. At the core of LiveWire is a server-side JavaScript engine that allows you to write and deploy applications that run on your Netscape web server. This allows you to execute program logic on your server to access server-side resources, including external files. You can also use LiveWire to maintain site visitor and session state informationfor example, to track a visitor through a session as the visitor moves from one page to another. LiveWire is also useful for sharing information within an application across multiple user sessions, or among a group of applications on a single server.

In general, it's very difficult to store or share information across multiple page accesses by using HTML. Although you can use CGI scripts to do this, the development of web applications using CGI programs is very awkward and time-consuming. In contrast, LiveWire provides a well-supported method for implementing interactive web applications quickly using the industry-standard JavaScript language. Because LiveWire is a built-in extension to the Netscape web server, calling a LiveWire program is more efficient than starting a new process, which is required to run a CGI program.

Independently of using NetObjects Fusion, you can use Acadia Infuse, which is bundled with NetObjects Fusion 2.0 for Windows, as a JavaScript editor. Because it has good support for LiveWire, it is a particularly good editor for developing LiveWire applications. The next section describes Infuse in more detail.

If you're using JavaScript at all, you'll want to install Acadia Infuse. If you're using LiveWire, you should find this tool even more useful for developing LiveWire applications. Besides its utility as a JavaScript editor, Infuse includes menu commands for building LiveWire applications or opening Netscape's Site Manager program. Another useful feature of Infuse is the inclusion of two menu commands for previewing your JavaScript code in either Navigator or Internet Explorer.

You can verify that this works by adding an external HTML document to a NetObjects Fusion 2.0 project and then double-clicking the element to launch your default HTML editor. The document should load inside a window within the Infuse editor. Follow these steps if you're not sure how to do this in NetObjects Fusion 2.0:

• In a NetObjects Fusion 2.0 project, create a new page in the Site view. For example, you can add a page to the "KVYB" web site described in the Getting Started tutorial, assuming you've already created the tutorial site. Otherwise, create a new page in any project or see the Getting Started tutorial to learn how to do this.
• Open the new page (you should be in Page View now) and click the Layout object on the page (for a new page, it will be empty). You should also see the Properties palette.
• Click the External HTML checkbox in the Layout tab in the Properties palette. Then click Browse to locate an HTML document you want to use as an external file for your new web page. For example, you can use marseille.htm by browsing in your NetObjects Fusion 2.0 folder until you locate the file in the following path: Tutorial\Assets\HTML Page\marseille.htm. After you select an HTML file to add, you'll see a large X in the page's Layout area, indicating that an external file has been added. If you double-click inside the Layout area, the external file should open in the default HTML editor. This editor should be Acadia Infuse if you followed all the steps above correctly. If you edit the file, the changes will automatically be propagated to your NetObjects Fusion project when you're ready to preview or publish it.

Now if you check the Tools menu, you should see that the commands to run LiveWire programs are both enabled.

The command line window should appear, but don't be surprised if it appears very briefly and then disappears (this is its current behavior with Infuse 1.0.1). If there are no compiler errors, your LiveWire application (.web file) should be built now. See your Netscape LiveWire documentation if you're not sure how to run a LiveWire application after it's built.

Infuse is an easy-to-use editor and most of its functions can be grasped intuitively. The Help menu includes quick access to Acadia's top ten tips for using Infuse and an online help system that describes the editor in detail. See the online documentation to learn how to use any feature in Infuse. If you have further questions, visit Acadia's web site at http://www.acadians.com or send email to support@acadians.com.

Infuse is a great tool for editing HTML and JavaScript files, but if you want to use NetObjects Fusion to create the layout of your pages and insert client- and/or server-side JavaScript in NetObjects Fusion, you'll need to insert your JavaScript code fragments inside the NetObjects Fusion Layout and Element Script editing boxes. For longer scripts, you might want to use Infuse to enter and edit your code, then copy and paste it into the appropriate NetObjects Fusion script editing box. For short JavaScript code fragments, however, it might be more convenient to enter your code directly in NetObjects Fusion. Either way, any files you create that contain LiveWire (server-side JavaScript) code must be compiled before previewing them or deploying them to a LiveWire server. If the JavaScript code is contained within NetObjects Fusion pages, follow the steps described in the next section. If you already have a set of HTML and JavaScript files that you're ready to compile, see the section above on compiling LiveWire applications using Infuse. Alternatively, you can use Netscape's Site Manager or command-line compiler to build your LiveWire application.