There has been a recent surge of interest in more light weight approaches for rapid web application development, highlighted by the rise in popularity of RubyOnRails, especially amongst the Java/J2EE developer community.

But using a framework like RoR means Java developers need to learn not only a new language, but a new class library and completely different ways of working, giving up their very valuable experience and knowledge of the Java and J2EE.

Helma, a server-side Javascript web development framework offers a compelling alternative. Built on the Java platform and using technologies (Servlets, JDBC, etc) familiar to Java web application developers, it provides much of the same functionality as RoR while still letting Java developers have easy access to any Java libraries they need. Likewise, using JavaScript as the scripting language means that Java developers have a more familiar language to work with and one they may already be familiar with if they are building AJAXy, Web 2.0 style applications.

Helma is also being featured in the latest OpenExpo which looks to be shaping up to be a great event. (Note: You might need to know German to get the full value of the event – no I do not speak or understand German but google translate does a decent job)

It was also featured in a Linux Journal in and around September 2007 (I’ll post the issue when I look it up again) from it I started HelmaBlog.com which can help you get a simple feed reader project under way.

Helma is worth checking out if you are into JavaScript development. I’m working on a comparison of Helma and Grails and Groovy On Rails – we’ll see where that goes.