==============
ABOUT ANTVILLE
==============

Antville is an open source project aimed to the development of an 
"easy to maintain and use" weblog-hosting system. It can easily host 
up to several hundred or thousand weblogs (the number of weblogs is 
more limited by the site owner's choice and server power than software 
limitations).

Antville is entirely written in JavaScript (ECMAScript, to be precise)
and based on Helma Object Publisher, a powerful and fast scriptable
open source web application server (which itself is written in Java).
Antville works with a relational database in the backend.

Check out http://project.antville.org/ for more information.


============================
ABOUT HELMA OBJECT PUBLISHER
============================

Helma Object Publisher is a web application server.

With Helma Object Publisher (sometimes simply referred to as Helma or 
Hop) you can define Objects and map them to a relational database 
table. These so-called HopObjects can be created, modified and deleted 
using a comfortable object/container model. Hence, no manual fiddling 
around with database code is necessary.

HopObjects are extended JavaScript objects which can be scripted using 
server-side JavaScript. Beyond the common JavaScript features, Helma 
provides special "skin" and template functionalities which facilitate 
the rendering of objects via a web interface.

Thanks to Helma's relational database mapping technology, HopObjects 
create a hierarchical structure, the URL space of a Helma site. The 
parts between slashes in a Helma URL represent HopObjects (similar to 
the document tree in static sites). The Helma URL space can be thought 
of as an analogy to the Document Object Model (DOM) in client-side 
JavaScript.


======
STATUS
======

Antville should be considered pre-release quality code. Although it is 
heavily used by several thousands of users at http://www.antville.org 
chances are that there are still bugs hidden somewhere in this 
application (if you found one please report it at 
http://helma.org/bugs).

Antville can be used for production purposes, but please mind that the 
creators of Antville and Helma do not take any warranty (whichever 
kind).


===================
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
===================

To run Antville you need Helma Object Publisher (http://helma.org) and 
a relational database in the backend. Antville was tested with MySQL 
(http://www.mysql.com) and Oracle (v.8.1.7). For setting up Helma 
Object Publisher and the database of your choice please refer to their 
installation instructions. Since Antville sends confirmation mails to 
users (i.e. after registration or if they were added to the list of 
members of a site), you'll also need access to an SMTP server.

Helma comes with its own embedded webserver (Jetty) so you don't need 
to install one, although you can easily use Apache httpd as front-end
webserver too (this might be necessary for really big Antville 
installations or if you need advanced features like URL rewriting).


=====================================
DOCUMENTATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION
=====================================

To get the documentation and further information regarding Antville 
please refer to:
http://project.antville.org
http://macros.antville.org (the documentation of Antville macros)
http://help.antville.org

Feel free to ask any question regarding the application at 
http://project.antville.org

For further information about Helma http://helma.org generally is a 
good place. There is also a mailing-list about Helma-related stuff 
available at http://helma.org/lists/listinfo/hop.


==================================
BUG REPORTING AND FEATURE REQUESTS
==================================

If you find any bug please report it at http://helma.org/bugs. Please 
post feature requests or proposals to http://project.antville.org. 
Since Antville is open-source, you're definetly encouraged to modify 
the application, but please keep us informed on what you do/did 
(either by posting at http://project.antville.org or by sending a mail 
to antville@helma.org). For those of you who demonstrated a commitment 
to collaborative open- source development through sustained 
participation and contributions within the development of Antville, 
there will also be other ways to participate.
