Helma Object Publisher, application server parented by Hannes Wallnöfer, used by the ORF amongst others.

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.

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.

Why another application server?

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.

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.

www.helma.org