Helma Blog

Hi all,

Its been a little while since my last post and I just wanted to post that I’m working on helma code in my 1 hour a week free time at the moment. I have taken steps to introduce Helma to the Toronto DemoCamp community (Another Link To Democamp info more uptodate). As well I have initiated an Ajax / Javascript PubNite in the style of Rails Pubnite.  Anyone in T.O. who wants to geek out and drink with a bunch of like minded people should show up. Its at a bar called “Rhino”!!!!

More to come soon - xmas and all coming up has forced a tight release schedule at work.

Cheers,

Kristan “Krispy” Uccello

This came up on the irc channel this morning:

<hypersmil> is there a planned release date for helma 1.7?
<zumbrunn> hypersmil, my guess would be february 2007
<zumbrunn> but that’s just my guess
<zumbrunn> february 2008 I mean, of course
<zumbrunn> the roadmap claims it will be still in 2007
<zumbrunn> but I could also see it slip beyond february 2008
<zumbrunn> first, there should be a 1.6.1 with some bug fixes and small changes
<hypersmil> is helma 2 still alive?
<zumbrunn> yes, but there is no need for it right now
<zumbrunn> most of the things that hannes thought require helma 2 have turned out to be achievable in helma 1.x
<zumbrunn> helma 2 is ready for when we think we hit a wall with helma 1
<hypersmil> helma 2 would be a complete rewrite?
<zumbrunn> yes, pretty much
<zumbrunn> a cleaned out fresh core
<zumbrunn> http://dev.helma.org/source/browse/helma/trunk/
<zumbrunn> the way we currently work, release dates are hard to predict
<zumbrunn> often new ideas are introduces shortly before an “almost release”
<zumbrunn> and the timeline shifts as a result
<hypersmil> like the subskin feature in 1.6?
<zumbrunn> not really so far…
<zumbrunn> meaning I haven’t used it yet
<zumbrunn> have not seen the need
<zumbrunn> which doesn’t mean it’s a bad feature
<hypersmil> how did you create the helma reference docs?
<zumbrunn> with jsdoc (a perl script) and the reference files in the svn repository…
<zumbrunn> https://dev.helma.org/trac/helma/browser/apps/reference/trunk
<zumbrunn> I’m right now changing it to work with the new rhino based jsdoc-toolkit

Its been a few days since my last post. This is due in part to my insane work life - software development sucks a lot of your time. In an effort to really learn Helma and associated think I have embarked on an application that will be a blog app. I know its not very “creative” but I figure if Continue reading »

So after much adu and some help from Chris Zumbrunn http://zumbrunn.com I have a working Feed Reader application. Now its not perfect (far from it) but it does do what I want at the moment - basically read a feed from a database and then get the latest entries for that feed and display them. I am going to be adding to this application over the next little while (until I get board of it) and see what other unique and interesting things I can make it do.

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I have just completed the Helma Tutorial located at http://helma.org/docs/tutorial/ and I am wondering why I did not start there before. I must like the pain of not understanding something simple. It is kind of like studying astrophysics to learn how to use a telescope. Anyway, I finished the tutorial and was very pleased with the result. I have placed the code here and welcome you to download it and play with it yourself.

Some things to note about the example code Continue reading »

Q and A on setting up your new shiny Helma application.

I’ll preface this with a “I’m new to Helma so this my understanding so far”. The directory structure of a Helma application took me a bit of time to understand - I’m not sure why but I blame some of the examples I first looked at. They were much more advanced then what I should have been looking at.
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Helma is a JavaScript (yes JavaScript - don’t giggle or snicker) based application server that has been around for a while. Web applications for Helma can be written in JavaScript, and in Java (if you want to). The latest Linux Pro Magazine (November 2007 - Issue 84) has a great article on setting up Helma and witting an rss reader application. Unfortunately for the uninitiated it can still be a little tricky to set it up to run. At least I had some issues. Mainly that after following the instructions in the article (Admittedly I was using Helma 1.6 not 1.5.3 as listed in the issue) I was getting nowhere fast. I kept getting:
Continue reading »