I have used Frontier, which is the earlier version of what became
Manila.
Manila does NOT have a full fledged dbms. It has a simple,
easy-to-use hierarchical "object database". It also incorporates its
own scripting language, which has bits of Lisp, TCL, and C influence.
Its main strengths are its simplicity and its library of functions for
handling HTML. You design a template for your site and then "render"
(turn into HTML pages) each page. You can embed scripts inside the
pages. So it is very good for consistency. It also has neat scripts
that for instance will re-render a page to static HTML whenever its'
content changes. You can also run it in full dynamic mode, where each
page request causes a script to run (like adp or .tcl pages). It has
several neat ideas - one is an outline (hierarchical tree) type, with
functions that let you walk the tree in various ways. Plus it has
builtin features for handling tables. It also has non-validating XML
support.
Its main weaknesses are that it is not robustly multi-user the way
Oracle or Postgres is - it uses something similar to file-locking to
ensure that only one person at a time is editing that page; that it is
not open-source; that it uses its own language (new stuff to learn)
that is OK but not great (lots of special cases, idiosyncracies); and
that it is $899 PER USER, so if you have a development box and a
deployment box, you need to buy 2 licenses. And the Linux version is
not considered very stable, so you have to run Mac or Windows NT/2K as
your server.
