"Why another scripting framework/application server?
Because, quite simply, the one we want hasn't been built by anybody else 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 how many web developers you know sleep with the EJB spec under their pillow? That's what we thought. 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.
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.
Helma is written in Java and employs Javascript for its server-side scripting environment, removing the need for compilation cycles and reducing development costs while giving you instant access to leverage the whole wealth of Java libraries out there.
Helma pioneered the simple and codeless mapping of application objects to database tables, which has only recently come into vogue with other web frameworks. In addition, an embedded object-oriented database performs automatic data persistence of unmapped objects.
Helma has proven itself to be stable and fast, capable of serving high traffic sites with hundreds of thousands of dynamic pages per day."
