VANCOUVER, British Columbia – March 25, 2000 – ActiveState, a leading supplier of products and services supporting Open Source Software, announced today that ActivePerl 5.6 is now available for download. ActivePerl 5.6 is ActiveState's value added, binary distribution of Perl for the Windows, Linux and Solaris operating systems, which is now faster, easier to install and offers more support for Web developers. Copies can be downloaded for free from www.ActiveState.com. "ActivePerl 5.6 is both more powerful and easier to use. Thus we're expecting an increase in the already substantial number of downloads from last year, which totaled 4.5 million," stated Dick Hardt, CEO, ActiveState. "We are committed to the evolution of and broadening the appeal of core Open Source Perl and Python technologies. This distribution, in addition to our commercially supported solutions, melds the advantages of Open Source's innovations and commercial software's quality assurance for Web professionals." "I believe the ActivePerl 5.6 release marks a new level of productivity for Perl users on Linux, Solaris and Windows," stated Gurusamy Sarathy, Senior Developer, ActiveState and ActivePerl 5.6 Release Manager. "We have worked very hard to give users everything they're going to need. And when I say "everything", I mean everything. Some of these major features include: beginnings of support for Unicode, ability to run concurrent interpreters, better 64-bit and large filesystem support, new regular expression constructs, and tutorials on various subjects. Plus Windows users will have increased compatibility with CPAN extensions, Windows 2000 installation support, and access to native Unicode functionality in Windows NT and 2000 environments." Benefits of ActivePerl 5.6:
- Cross platform. Available on Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms.
- Installation is faster with the binary build.
- Documentation is in html and is easily accessible.
- Modules are easily installed, removed, and upgraded with the Perl Package Manager (PPM).
"Perl has been a huge underground success story," said Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly & Associates. "But the lack of standardized support and distribution limits its availability to many of those who could benefit from it. ActiveState's ActivePerl 5.6 makes Perl accessible at a whole new level."
About Perl: Perl has long been the most popular Web programming language and is currently used by companies such as Amazon.com, MP3.com, and Deja.com to run their Websites. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs. Perl is also robust enough to allow for the creation of complex programs. Because Perl is extremely useful in "gluing" together smaller programs into larger applications, it has often been referred to as "the duct tape of the Internet." Due to its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for building Internet applications and is currently used by over one million programmers worldwide. With the Internet as the standard medium for the transfer of business information, Perl is an integral part of web developers, administrators and system administrators' tools on Linux, UNIX and Windows platforms.
