Hi.
1) The Jala lib was developed independently and is therefore not part of Helma. So there is no port to RingoJS at all.
Parts of it are available in different implementations like lucindex [1] adding lucene-capabilities to RingoJS.
2) Cronjobs may be done with setInterval(function, interval) for example. I have no knowledge of any library implementing a cron job-runner like helma has.
3) We never used session-replication in helma, but you surely could do this somehow. For example using something like couchdb as session-storage and a custom-session-cookie as key. It should also be possible to use jetty-features [2], but i havn't looked into it yet.
A HelmaSwarm equivalent isn't available by now, but i know there is some wip to support cache-invalidation within a cluster. Watch ringo-sqlstore. [3]
4) I personally dislike Helma Groups. We had some troubles resulting in unpredictable serverlockups sometimes forcing us to restart every cluster node. Again i would consider looking into couchDB. It should be fairly easy to use the java-client of couchDB.
5) I also would realy like some callback-functions which get called when a transaction completes (like onRemove or onStore called when a model is stored or removed.. talking about ringo-sqlstore here). Maybe we will get this in the near future.
6) If you are happy about a small footprint i think ringo should have even a smaller footprint, but i did no comparison to back this guess with confidence.
best wishes, manfred
[1]
https://github.com/grob/lucindex