[ba-ohs-talk] Helma Object Publisher
Java. BSD license.
http://helma.org/ (01)
In the search for something to serve as a foundation for a web publisher
for an OHS/DKR, I have passed along many links to this list. The one I am
now passing seems to present an enormous leap in capability. I'll attach
some quotes from the site below, but let me now point out some of the features. (02)
As a Web object publisher, you might expect there are some interesting
applications to go with it.
Start with two weblogs, one of which can be exercised (with many examples)
at http://www.antville.org/ (03)
A WikiWiki, which can be exercised at http://gong.helma.at/ (04)
A Flash applet (no example available, but the source code is downloadable) (05)
A simple image database http://www.langreiter.com/space/DingsBox -- which,
BTW, is GPL, and written on top of Helma (I wonder how that will pan out) (06)
A webMail client http://www.knallgrau.at/helmamailclient (assuming you can
read the German). (07)
As I am sending this, I am doing a cvs dump of the entire project. Given
that it uses HSQLDB as one of its database options (which I already use in
Nexist), and it includes its own server (according to the web site), I
think I'll just run it on my local machine. With a wiki, weblog, and email
client, I may be able to make use of it immediately. (08)
Requisite web quotation:
"Welcome to Helma.org, home of the Hop.
Helma (also called Helma object publisher, or Hop for short) is a
scriptable open source web application server written in Java. (09)
Helma is already being used by popular sites that serve hundreds of
thousands of dynamic pages per day. Our goal is to build on that to make it
the tool of choice for a broad range of web services while keeping it fun
to work with. (010)
Why another application server? (011)
Because, quite honestly, the one we need hasn't been built yet. What we
need is a platform that offers a high level of abstraction on the prevalent
web application concepts, but is not dumbed down and stripped of power and
flexibility in order to be "idiot proof". The problem of so many J2EE
solutions is that they are targeted to Java developers. But do you have to
sleep with the Java language specification under your pillow in order to
build clean and solid web applications? We don't think so. On the other
hand, high level platforms often sacrifice the smart concepts in the
underlying layers because their architects don't trust their users to be
able to grasp those concepts. That's why JSP was patterened after Microsoft
ASP when everybody doing serious web work already knew how broken that
approach was. (012)
Our credo is: Building websites should not be a task of system level
programming. But when you bring web site building to the "ordinary people",
they should be able to use the serious tools to get the job done. That's
what we're trying to provide with Helma. " (013)