Hi there, I updated the antville/antclick build environment and put out up-to-date packages:

helma.org (*nix) helma.org (Windows)

Gotta run and cook dinner now, so I'll keep it short: Antclick is an integrated Helma/Antville package. It comes with an integrated web server and SQL database. It should run out of the box although you may have to modify the start script. All you need to run it is Java 1.3 or higher.

This version of Antclick comes with Mckoi as embedded database now, which should be able to scale to a few hundred megs of data (I said should, haven't tried yet). Basically, the only weak spot left now is the embedded web server. I'm currently investigating into what it would take to replace it with Jetty.

Please let me know what you find!

Update: Just to avoid a common misunderstanding, although Antcklick comes preconfigured with the Mckoi database, it is perfectly possible to reconfigure it to run it with other databases (just as it is possible to configure it to run in a servlet container like Tomcat instead of the built-in web server). All you have to do is update the db.properties file in the apps/antville directory and add the JDBC-driver for your database to the classpath. Currently, Antville supports MySQL and Oracle out of the box, but there's no reason why it shouldn't be possible to add support for other db products.

Update 2 (July 31): The Mckoi database that was packaged with this Antclick prerelease has a bug that causes trouble with large text items. If you do anything serious with it, please replace the lib/mckoidb.jar file in your installation with this patched version (right click and save-as):

mckoidb (application/octet-stream, 647 KB)

Make sure that you stop and restart Antclick if you update to the patched version!

yesterday, i quickly added some code to the antville installation at hopdev.helma.org (ie. what will become the future helma.org website) and fulfilled a desire i've had since i began writing parts of the helma documentation: creating shortcuts.

i don't know if or how this could be related to a request over at help.antville.org but here is how it works:

you create a short cut by entering its title (ie. the name you will use for it later) and the content (ie. what you want to spare yourself writing all the time) and then include it in a story or skin via a new macro <% shortcut name="shortcutTitle" %> (quite similar as you might be used to do with images or links).

hence, the macro will be replaced by the corresponding content of the shortcut which title equals the name parameter.

here's a screenshot of how it looks at hopdev:

e.g. the third shortcut is called by <% shortcut name="FESI" %&gt, and produces FESI as output.

and now my question: should this get into the main cvs branch of antville or not?