==============
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 and based on the 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 refered 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 severeal thousand 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 as frontend-
webserver too (this might be necessary for really big Antville-
installations or if you need advanced features like URL-rewriting).


============
INSTALLATION
============

The Antville-distribution contains a .zip-file with several sql-
scripts for creating the database needed by the application: for mySQL 
(antville_mysql.sql) and for Oracle databases (antville_oracle.sql) -
the third one, antville_mckoi.sql, is only used for the Antclick-
distribution of Antville.

Both scripts are not only creating the tables, indexes and initial 
records, but also the account used by the application to communicate 
with the database. The default username and password of this account 
is "antville", so you probably want to change that (you should!).

Please refer to the documentation of your database on how to run the 
appropriate script. After done so you'll have to tell Antville how it 
can access your database. This is done in a configuration file named 
"db.properties". Antville comes with two templates, one for MySQL 
(antville_mysql.sql) and one for Oracle (antville_oracle.sql). Open 
the template for your database and ensure that the line beginning with 
"antville.url=" points to the server that runs the database (for MySQL 
this will in most cases look like http://localhost:3306/antville). 
Check that user and password are correct and save the file as 
"db.properties" (without the quotes) in the root-directory of the 
Antville-installation (if it is already existing you can safely 
overwrite it).

Finally, open the file "apps.properties" located in the directory 
where you installed Helma and append the word "antville" (without 
quotes) in a new line. Then start up Helma, and after pointing your 
browser to http://localhost/antville you should see Antville's welcome 
page. It will tell you about the two additional configuration steps 
necessary: you need to register to gain system administration rights 
and then you must configure the basic preferences (like language, 
date- and time-formats etc.)

NOTE: If you're using Oracle you need to install the JDBC-driver for 
your database by placing the appropriate .zip-file into the 
subdirectory "lib/ext" located in Helma's installation directory.

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

To get the documentation and further information regarding Antville 
please refer to:
http://project.antville.org
http://macros.antville.org
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 bugs or have any ideas about new features, please post 
them to http://project.antville.org or send a mail to 
antville@helma.org. Since Antville is open-source, you're definetly 
encouraged to modify the application, but please keep us informed on 
what you do/did. 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.

--
<0A> 2002, antville@helma.org
http://project.antville.org

This document was last modified on Sunday 31 December 2002 by
robert@helma.org