Helma... "uses Rhino JavaScript, the oldest language on the JVM besides Java itself. Rhino was created by Netscape and later inherited by the Mozilla Foundation. It is backed by Google, and it is the default scripting language implementation available in Java 6. It offers strong performance and a rich set of utilities, all of which Helma leverages beautifully."
"Helma was the easiest to get up and running. Once you download the package, run ./start.sh [...] and navigate to http://localhost:8080/ to find a page with links to various tools, documentation, and the Helma website."
...attempts to explain Helma concepts...
"The biggest challenge learning Helma is shifting your mode of thinking—not entirely different from first learning JavaScript’s prototype-based object system. Most frameworks are written in object-oriented languages; Helma is an object-oriented framework. It is a subtle, but critical distinction. With Helma, you build one massive object that is the web application. While confusing at first, the final organization seems very intuitive."
...finds some things to reasonably gripe about...
"Helma’s organization does lead to some weird cases. For instance, consider registering a new user. This should obviously be an action placed under the User prototype. Right? Wrong. Every User action must match up to an existing user. Therefore the registerUser action must be stored in Root. As a result, this directory can feel like a random grab-bag.
In theory, you could avoid this issue by creating a default object and cloning it. This would fit nicely with the cloning-based approach of prototype-based object systems, but it does not seem to be the standard for Helma."
...and concludes...
"[...] developing an application in Helma was a pleasure. The organization, while unusual, was also very powerful and will challenge your assumptions about how web development should be done. [...] While its libraries are decent, they pale compared to Rails and Grails. Still, it was the most fun to develop in."
independence:
1 August 1291
- de facto:
22 September 1499
- recognized:
24 October 1648
- restored:
7 August 1815
- constitution:
12 September 1848
tld:
.ch
name:
Eidgenossenschaft (oath cooperative)
official name:
Confoederatio Helvetica (CH)
capital:
de jure: none, de facto: Berne
head of state:
undefined
head of government:
none
executive branch:
federal council with principle of collegiality
form of government:
half-direct concordance-democracy, sui generis
official language:
no particular one
nationality:
none, actually, since the point of the confederation
is a pact to swear that we do not want to belong to anything like
that, la Suisse n'existe pas. Ok, foreigners refer to it as
Swiss, but being swiss is a denationality and Switzerland is a denation.
sovereignty:
it's not just about voting rights: the power is with
the people, they are the army and they keep their guns at home.
Sometimes these guns are used for ugly suicides, but hey, that is
a right a sovereign citizen has, and since as a logical
consequence assisted suicide is legal as well, there are usually
less violant options available with the help of non-profit "exit"
organisations. Anyway, what the guns are there for primarily, of
course, is to ensure that the sovereignty can never be taken away
from the people, not even by their own government. The guns are
there as a dissuasion, to ensures that they will never be used
after all.
solidarity:
if your fellow citizens have guns at home and are
trained to use them, you better show due solidarity. Plus, it's
in the spirit of that oath, remember? Unus Pro Omnibus - Omnes Pro Uno.
subsidiarity:
citizens delegate administrative processes and
governance to the most local level possible: their community. The
communities may further delegate issues that can not be
appropriately handled at a local level to more distant levels,
such as their districts, cantons or the confederation. That also
means that, as a foreigner, you can't get the citizenship
directly from the confederation, instead you have to be accepted
by one of its communities as one of their own.
sustainability:
only if we are willing to do the work.
Sustainability is the double-process of living the system in ways
sustainable for its environment while sustaining the system
itself.
and btw,
in case you noticed: the conceptual analogies are not
coincidental - this confederation is political open source - feel
free to copy the bits you like to improve its concepts as part of
your own political systems. We'll be watching with interest and
are eager to learn from your anarchistic development.
The puzzle pieces are starting to come together: Hannes'
Helma NG
screencast of a development environment running in the browser, with fine grained security and sandboxing. In other words, allowing untrusted users to write hosted serverjs apps using a web-based editor:
PubSubHubBub,
a simple, open, server-to-server HTTP-based publish/subscribe protocol as an extension to Atom. Exactly the way I would go about doing away with smtp and
reinventing foaf,
killing spam and walled garden social networks at one fell swoop.
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benefiting from local diversity and
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decentralized fabric of society.
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