From one of the very early experiments in "Weblogs" in 1998 and the open sourcing of the "HOP" in the year 2000 to the widely deployed and mature Helma as we know it, plus the first experimental attempts at a Helma-rewrite as a lean and mean js runtime, initially called "Rhinola" and running on top of mod_gcj, which evolved into a candidate for "Helma 2" and later was codenamed "Helma NG" , the project now known as RingoJS can truly be called "Server-Side Javascript since... way back!"

RingoJS is a thin wrapper around Rhino providing a CommonJS conformant module library and web application framework. If you are using Rhino and/or are interested in CommonJS and ServerJS in general, the brand new RingoJS 0.4 release might be worth checking out.

http://ringojs.org/wiki/Release 0.4/

The most notable new features:

• updated CommonJS compliance
• improved web application modules
• optimizations regarding code caching and resource loading
• updated Rhino snapshot with more ES5 features in JavaScript 1.8
• unittest module; we are now shipping with 235 tests
• jsdoc module using Rhino's AST feature and powering the API docs web app
• POSIX support; using JRuby's jnr-posix libraries
• admin script for creating web app scaffolding
• simplified Google App Engine deployment
• new logging module based on log4j/SLF4J
• lots of new JSGI middleware; gzip, etag, transaction, profiler, ...
• new CLI arguments parser in pure JS

Pre-built downloads for Linux, Mac and Windows can be found on github: http://github.com/ringo/ringojs/downloads

And, of course, our new ringojs.org site is now powered by RingoJS.

So you can see how easy it is to take RingoJS for a spin on Google App Engine, Hannes has produced the Deploying RingoJS on Google App Engine screencast for your viewing pleasure :-)