Tobi is working on parss, an rss aggregator application based on Helma. Parss features an XmlRpc interface that is open for any client software, and Antville will be the first application where the parss client will be integrated. This means that Antville will soon have seamlessly integrated rss feeds ("one click to post").

What fascinates me on parss is the concept: instead of every client fetching a feed periodically its just subscribing the feed in parss, the fetching/merging is done there. Which means network traffic for those offering rss feeds is greatly reduced. And there is much room for advanced features ...

This Howto assumes that you have a Linux system with the following software packages already installed and configured:

• Java 2 SDK
• MySQL

Download the latest version of Helma at http://helma.org/download (about 3.3MB). Unpack it and move the resulting directory to /usr/local/ or any other location you want to. It's a good idea to either rename the directory to helma or to create a symbolic link called helma pointing to the installation directory of helma.

Start a shell and change to the installation directory of helma. Open the start script hop.sh in your preferred text editor. Modify the variable JAVA_HOME to point to the installation directory of the Java SDK or Runtime Environment you installed in step 1. For now you don't need to change anything more.

Start up Helma by executing hop.sh in a shell. Open a browser and enter the following URL: http://localhost:8080/manage (assuming that you're working on your local machine, otherwise you need to replace localhost with the domain name or ip address of your machine). If everything works you should get a page telling you how to configure the manage application (this application is for the administration of Helma applications and for creating the source code documentation of them).

Shut down Helma again. Download the latest Antville at http://code.google.com/p/antville/downloads/list?can=4 (choose the .tar.gz version). Unpack the archive into the subdirectory apps located in the installation directory of Helma. Unpack the archive db_support.zip to a temporary directory. Inside the resulting directory db_support you will find a file called antville_mysql.sql. This is the sql script used for creating the database needed by Antville.

Open the sql script in your favorite text editor and scroll down to the line that starts with GRANT .... This line ends with IDENTIFIED by 'antville'. Replace the default password 'antville' with a more secure one. Save the script and open a command shell. Then run the sql script by typing

mysql -u root -p < /path/to/antville_mysql.sql

in the shell (you'll be prompted for the root's password). Alternatively you can log in to your MySQL database (as 'root') and type in the following:

@source <path to the script>antville_mysql.sql

In the directory where you unpacked the archive db_support.zip before you'll find a file called db.properties.mysql. Copy this file into the installation directory of Antville, remove the file db.properties there and rename the copied file db.properties.mysql to db.properties. Open the file in a text editor and change it according to your setup (in most cases you will just have to enter the password that you defined before you created the database).

Download the latest JDBC driver from mysql.com. Unpack the archive into a temporary directory and copy the .jar file into the subdirectory lib/ext of your Helma installation directory. This driver enables Helma to communicate with your MySQL database.

Create two subdirectories called antville/images and antville/files in the directory static of your Helma installation. Unpack the archive images.zip located in the Antville application directory somewhere into this directory.

Change to the Antville application directory (apps/antville) and open the file app.properties in a text editor. Modify the lines

imgPath = static/images/
## path where files will be stored
filePath = static/files/

## url of weblog-images
imgUrl = /static/images/
## url of files
fileUrl = /static/files/

to the following:

imgPath = static/antville/images/
## path where files will be stored
filePath = static/antville/files/

## url of weblog-images
imgUrl = /static/antville/images/
## url of files
fileUrl = /static/antville/files/

Open the file apps.properties in your Helma installation directory. Enter the following lines at the end of the file:

antville
antville.mountpoint=/antville

Start up Helma again. This time it should tell you that it loaded the MySQL JDBC driver. Try to access Antville using http://localhost:8080/antville. It should present you the initial welcome page telling you how to configure Antville. If you can't see any images check if you followed the above steps correctly. If you're seeing a lot of error messages in the page asking you if there's a MySQL database running on your machine check if Helma/Antville can access your database with the credentials you defined.

If everything went fine you're done with the first big setup step. Antville/Helma is now using your MySQL database instead of the embedded McKoi database, but still you have to configure Apache as frontend webserver. This is explained in the Howto Connecting Apache and Helma via mod_jk (AJP13) at the Helma project website.