Mainstay's JustEdit and JustEdit Pro
| While most developers are familiar with the use of an FTP client, we've all faced situations where we need to edit our site but just don't have access to the software we need. Mainstay has come up with a way to solve that problem with their JustEdit familiy of products. |
If you're a web developer, it's probably happened to you. You're in the airport, ready to fly out to some forsaken city on a business trip, and you suddenly realize that, doh, you didn't update the homepage with that ultra-important information before you left the office! You didn't bring your laptop on this trip, but you really need some way of updating the site, and you needed it twenty minutes ago. What to do, what to do?
Mainstay has a solution that just requires access to a web browser. No FTP, no fancy HTML editor, just Netscape 4 and up or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 and up. Almost any platform will do, including Microsoft Windows 95, Macintosh, and Unix. In the scenario above, you could have mosied over to one of those internet terminals that are starting to pop up all over the country, opened up a web browser, and updated your site in about two minutes. Magic? Not quite, but remember when you thought to yourself that all Java seemed to be used for was fancy animations and bar graphs? With JustEdit and JustEdit Pro, Mainstay has proved that Java can not only be useful, it can save the day.
Mainstay 591-A Constitution Avenue Camarillo, California 93012 United States of America Direct Sales: (800) 484-9817, code 8026 Phone: (805) 484-9400 FAX: (805) 484-9428 General Information: info@mstay.com Tech Support Department: support@mstay.comJustEdit is a Java applet that resides on the web server in exactly the same way as all the other Java applets you've seen. Upon arriving at the JustEdit editing page, the user is presented with the login screen, where they must input their name, password and the path of the file they wish to edit. All of this information can be listed by default in the login screen, or each part may be required to be filled in, according to the way the page is set up. The page is no more or less secure than any other tool that utilizes the File Tranfer Protocol, although in my opinion, leaving your login name in by default is just asking for someone with too much time on their hands to practice their hacking skills on your site.
Once you have input your name and password, you have to put the path of the file you're looking for. This is the only confusing part of using this tool. When it says the complete path, that's exactly what it means! This is different for Windows NT servers than it is for Unix servers, but it is all clearly explained in the release notes. One requirement for using JustEdit is that the site must be configured such that the host's HTTP server and FTP server utilize the same IP address, but generally, this is the case anyway.
After you've successfully logged in, you are presented with the editing screen containing the page you have requested. You have the option of viewing it with a 10 point font or a 12 point font, so you can see more at one time. The editor is nothing fancy, as it is pretty much a basic text editor. Make your changes, click save and the page is updated. It works with text files, HTML files, ASP files, CSS files--almost any text-based file.
The tool also has the ability to edit more than one page at a time. Just go back to the login screen once the first page is up, and enter a different path pointing to another page. Very useful!
JustEdit 1.0: Web Page Editor $49.95 Online demo http://www.justedit.mstay.com/ Demo Version http://mstay.com/justedit_promo/index.html
Mainstay's JustEdit and JustEdit Pro
