About Helma

Helma is a highly integrated open source web application platform that combines the strength of the Java platform with the power and simplicity of scripting languages. Server side scripting languages such as Perl and PHP have been a mainstay of the Web since the early days. But scripted Web apps have often proved to be less than well-designed and maintainable. Helma, which is scripted with standard JavaScript, was built to encourage clean and simple application design.

Helma comes with both an embedded XML file based database and an efficient object-relational database mapping layer. Both allow developers to manipulate persistent objects through the same simple HopObject interface. This means no more worrying about how to store objects, or how to get to your stored objects. They're just there.

Persistent HopObjects are directly mapped to the site's URI space as a hierarchy of named objects just as folders or directories in a file system. This means no more weird URLs - a point that may seem minor, but is important to us. Just look around this site to see what we mean.

On the web templating side, Helma comes with a action/skin/macro threesome that encourages total separation of presentation from content. It's simply not possible to embed any logic in the presentation layer - all you do is dial up macros which serve as connectors between the web and the application object model. If you think that sounds rigid, you'll be surprised that many users - even those that are new to HTML - find it easy and fun to use.

Finally, Helma is a mature piece of software. It has been in production use on websites by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation and other companies for years, serving up to hundreds of thousands of pages per day.

Interested? Here's a more detailed introduction to the basic concepts and features of Helma.

There's also some information about the people behind Helma.

A few of the people working on the Helma project.

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