Helma, finally something for me!
Monday, 20. August 2007, 15:14:59
Last few days I have been trying to learn Ruby on Rails. Even if it in some ways feel like a good thing, I am not really compatible with it. When something goes wrong, it goes very wrong, and it is really hard to debug. Also, the very idea behind Rails, generating a lot of code that you later can change is not my cup of tea.
Back to basics. Server-side Javascript is a topic that I have been eager to try out for a long time, last time Whitebeam seemed to be the coolest one, but I never got the time to start using it. And it is now 2 years since the page updated. The only framework listed on Wikipedia based on Javascript is Helma.
Helma seems still be to be active, with the latest release (1.6) only one month old. It is easy to install, except for the usual hard integration with a relational database, but I found out that if you can live with an XML database, you don't have to do any configuration.
The documentation is good (I probably should rate it very good, by open source standards), and the way it works seems also to be good. I may have encountered some bugs, but it also be just me not being a good enough tool user. I think the amount of test code on their site is rather limited.
Helma is written in Java and Javascript, these languages I know, so I can get a full understanding of the tool one day. (With Rails, I need to learn Ruby, a fun task, but it will take a while to become good at it)
So, I started looking at Helma this morning, and now I have finally made my first guestbook ever. A tool that I actually can use to produce my first web application is well worth some more time.
Back to basics. Server-side Javascript is a topic that I have been eager to try out for a long time, last time Whitebeam seemed to be the coolest one, but I never got the time to start using it. And it is now 2 years since the page updated. The only framework listed on Wikipedia based on Javascript is Helma.
Helma seems still be to be active, with the latest release (1.6) only one month old. It is easy to install, except for the usual hard integration with a relational database, but I found out that if you can live with an XML database, you don't have to do any configuration.
The documentation is good (I probably should rate it very good, by open source standards), and the way it works seems also to be good. I may have encountered some bugs, but it also be just me not being a good enough tool user. I think the amount of test code on their site is rather limited.
Helma is written in Java and Javascript, these languages I know, so I can get a full understanding of the tool one day. (With Rails, I need to learn Ruby, a fun task, but it will take a while to become good at it)
So, I started looking at Helma this morning, and now I have finally made my first guestbook ever. A tool that I actually can use to produce my first web application is well worth some more time.
WIDGETIZE
petew63 # 24. January 2008, 23:22
We got our act together just before Christmas '07 and released 1.1.5.
The latest release has a license change (to BSD license) and includes the SpiderMonkey 1.5 release, which includes E4X.
It also includes other goodies like the ability to manipulate graphic images, framework support for building a chat-server and a host of other things.
We've now integrated the latest (Oct '07) release of SpiderMonkey which is under CVS and we'll be making a new release shortly including that along with improved PostgreSQL library support.
We also added an RPM release for Fedora to make life a little easier (although we're a little new to RPMs and support will improve with experience or suitable volunteers!)
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/whitebeam