The Antville FAQ

This is a list of questions being asked from time to time (but then again probably a better term would be not so infrequently asked questions), or questions some of the developers simply phantasized they should be asked once in a lifetime, or questions that in fact had to be invented because the answer was already there and it was considered necessary to make it public.

How does Antville perform?

Really good, to avoid saying excellent. From the beginning Antville was designed for maximum performance, just like Helma herself which is extremely fast and stable. So on a quite normal machine serving several hundred thousand pages per day isn't a big deal.

How does Antville differ from other tools like blogger.com?

(Note: This section needs to be rewritten due to the many other blogging tools which gained popularity in the meantime.)

First of all Antville is a centralized weblog hosting system: in contrary to blogger.com or Radio Userland it doesn't publish pages via FTP but serves them dynamically. One Antville server can easily host up to several hundred or thousand weblogs. (The number of weblogs is rather limited by the site owners choice and server power than by the software.)

Antville makes heavy use of the advantages of server based hosting. E.g. it has built-in support for comments, multiple authors per weblog, central login and registration etc.

Antville can be adapted easily to special needs by customizing its skins (that's how templates are called in Antville-speak), and to some extend even the structure of a site based on antville can be changed too. Have a look at the complete list of Antville features.

What are the features of Antville?

(Note: This section needs an update.)

Antville features the whole set of functionality needed for weblogs plus a number of advanced possibilities that make it distinguishable, eg. it supports any language, the structure of stories can be changed freely (no more limitation to just a title and a text body), stories can be stored in hierarchical "folders", it provides many options for image and file handling, has a powerful search engine integrated, comes with RSS feeds, user management and so on... Antville's list of features is long, but the best thing is: even it offers all these possibilities it is still designed in a way that makes it easy to use.

How did you start working on Antville?

Here's kind of a "right people right time" answer: once upon a time... Robert Gaggl and Hannes Wallnöfer were sitting in a bar, having a drink and talking about a weblog application as a "showcase" for Helma Object Publisher, a scriptable and open-source web application server written in Java. The original commit of Antville took place on the 18th of june 2001 and therefore marks the official day of birth. The event couldn't have taken place without the assistance of Tobi Schäfer completing the developer's team at that time.

What have been the reasons to start the project?

Recall 2001. At this time blogger.com (not yet acquired by Google but maintained by a company called Pyra labs which was in fact negotiating with Trellix) had some serious financing and performance problems due to the growing numbers of users.

As the media started to report excessively about weblogs blogger.com was promoted as one of the tools free of charge. The other weblog hosting service at that time, editthispage.com, had already closed down the gratuitous option. Thus, the need for a free and easy weblog hosting platform was increasing.

Furthermore, most of the other weblog services were considered far too complicated for average users. Thus, the project team worked from the beginning towards the goal to make Antville as easy to use as possible: register, create a weblog and start to write.

Last but not least, Helma Object Publisher itself has a long tradition as underlying application server for weblogs: it was used to maintain the collaborative weblog formerly known as Helma in 1998.

Is Antville a weblog hosting service?

Yes and no: Antville is the name of the software, but antville.org in fact is set up as a weblog hosting service. We have decided to freeze the amount of weblogs at antville.org end of 2002, mainly because of the incentive to keep the service free of charge and to avoid running into performance troubles again. Freezing antville.org was not an light-hearted decision but as the software is open source, anyone who wants to run a weblog hosting service can do so. You can do it, too!

How can I use Antville since it doesn't accept new weblogs?

Why not install Antville on your own machine? Antville and Helma both run on top of any operating system that supports Java 2 (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows 2000/XP/Vista). Thus, provided that you already have Helma Object Publisher running on your machine, simply dowload the lastest Antville release and follow the installation instructions.

For your personal setup or if you just want to give Antville a try, anyway, we provide a standalone distribution called Antclick which contains everything you need (except Java): Helma, Antville, a web server and a relational database. It is really easy to install and just takes a click to start it, all of the configuration can be done from within your browser.

For larger setups (e.g. hosting services like antville.org) we recommend to install a full-blown webserver (e.g. Apache) and a relational database (Antville was thoroughly tested with MySQL and Oracle).

Who else is using Antville?

Besides antville.org there are a number of bigger sites providing similar services as well as a bunch of private weblogs base on Antville. Those which we know about we have compiled into the list of sites based on Antville.

How does Antville relate to twoday?

First of all: twoday is based on Antville. At some point, some contributors weren't happy with the way the Antville project was evolving and decided to fork away their own version. And why, they wanted to go commercial. However, at its core every twoday site you see is Antville, beautiful and free as in free beer.

How does Antville relate to the national Austrian broadcaster (ORF)?

It is merely a conincidence that some years ago an excellent team of web developers met at the online subsidiary of ORF to create one of today's most recognized online news sites in the german speaking world. Unsurprisingly, some of these people shared a broader vision of weaving the web even outside the company. Thus, they were professional co-workers of ORF.at by day and devoted architects of Antville at night. And before you're asking: yes, they still had a private life.

I am a journalist looking for a good tech story. What's in it for me?

Well, how about this one: if you haven't realized yet, the last word here have the developers and the community, not the suits aka the business people. If it was the other way around you probably wouldn't be here by curiosity and reading these lines.

Second, this is an open source weblog system, free of charge. It can be widely used by communities setting up their own Antville server or by users pushing their provider to put weblog hosting into their portfolio (instead of free webspace). Antville is easy to install, to maintain and to use, so why not spread the news that people start to create and develop their own hosting service?

And last but not least: The Antville community is one swell brick of a community, really lovable, which already funded its own server hardware and right now it is going to pay one of the developers for a neat upgrade of the software.