VANCOUVER, British Columbia – February 4, 1999 – PerlEx 1.1, the latest version of the popular web server plug-in from ActiveState Tool Corp, is now available.
PerlEx 1.1 dramatically improves performance by pre-compiling Perl scripts and storing them in memory. Using a web server's native Application Program Interface (API), ActiveState has seen typical performance increases of 2 to 30 times, compared to an ordinary Perl ISAPI Dynamic Link Library or standalone Perl. PerlEx runs on all popular commercial Windows NT Web servers, including O'Reilly and Associates' WebSite Professional, Microsoft IIS 3.0 & 4.0, Microsoft Personal Web Server 4.0, and Netscape FastTrack and Enterprise servers. PerlEx can be downloaded for $395 U.S at (www.ActiveState.com/plex). An upgrade to PerlEx 1.1 is available at no cost to PerlEx 1.0 license holders from the same web page.
"Today's dynamic web sites will benefit greatly from the outstanding performance of PerlEx 1.1," says Dick Hardt, President and CTO of ActiveState Tool Corp. "We have performed tests comparing this latest version to Perl Common Gateway Interface (CGI) and competitors and the results are clear: when it comes to speed, PerlEx significantly outperforms the others."
ActiveState PerlEx 1.1 can handle significantly more user requests than Perl CGI or the competition, in a given time period. ActiveState's benchmark tests indicate that, with a typical script, PerlEx performs as much as 30 times faster than Perl CGI, and up to twice as fast as the competition. Scripts written to take advantage of PerlEx features may see an even greater performance increase.
PerlEx 1.1 is designed to be easy to install. An intelligent install simplifies the installation and server configuration process. Explanations of non-standard configurations are fully explained in the accompanying documentation. Improved documentation enables the user to easily get scripts running right away.
New features in PerlEx 1.1 include adaptation tools and performance monitoring. The PerlEx adaptation script identifies problems that can cause scripts to behave unexpectedly or fail. Users can simply run the PerlEx adaptation script, and follow the warnings, suggestions, and errors it identifies, to allow their scripts to run without difficulty. PerlEx 1.1 also now offers performance monitoring. Using the Windows NT Performance Monitor, the user can track areas of PerlEx performance, helping to determine the optimal settings and configuration for PerlEx. By taking advantage of specific PerlEx features, a web programmer can dramatically improve the performance of web applications. For example, database connections may be kept open, or a large file may be read and stored in memory, between invocations of a script.
The Embed functionality in PerlEx 1.1 enables the user to embed Perl in HTML documents, offering server-side scripting functionality similar to Microsoft's Active Server Pages, or .asp files on Microsoft Internet Information Server. The embedded Perl code is transparent to most commercial HTML editors, making it easy to edit the HTML in the file and immediately see what the page will look like in a browser. PerlEx 1.1 is one offering in a series of ActiveState products that broaden the capabilities of Perl developers; other professional tools from ActiveState include: PerlDirect, the upcoming Perl Development Kit 1.1 and VisualPerl.
