VANCOUVER, British Columbia – December 5, 2000 – ActiveState, the leading provider of Internet programming software and services, and XMLFund, the first XML technology investment fund, have partnered to develop an integrated development environment (IDE) for XSLT to work with Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET and with ActiveState's Mozilla-based environment, Komodo. The XSLT IDE will be cross-platform and will enable programmers to debug XSL transformations.
XSLT is a language for transforming XML documents. It is a member of the XML family of standards and was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Its most common uses are for generating HTML documents, extracting information from an XML document, and translating between vocabularies in B2B applications.
"We're delighted to work with an up and coming programming language that is a perfect addition to our cross-platform multi-language IDEs," said Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. "XMLFund is a great partner given their experience in the XML space. We're looking forward to working with them on providing professional tools for this emerging technology."
"ActiveState is perfectly suited for developing a visual environment for XSLT given their expertise in building IDEs for other programming languages," said Dave Pool, Founder of XMLFund. "We were impressed by their XML initiatives with the Perl and Python languages and we're excited about collaborating on making XSLT more accessible with an easy-to-use GUI environment."
"XSLT is one of our core technologies. We use it to integrate enterprise data and deliver information to end-user desktops. ActiveState's background in software development environments and depth in XML knowledge should create a highly productive new tool. This can accelerate the adoption of XSLT and XML technologies in general," said Carla Corkern, Vice President of Professional Services & Training, DataChannel.
"XSLT is a powerful tool for integrating heterogeneous XML systems and building XML-centric web applications," said Paul Prescod, Senior Developer ActiveState. "The two main problems that hinder XML implementation in industry are vocabulary interoperability and difficult tools. Unfortunately, writing XSLT is harder than it should be. We're addressing these issues with a development environment that will make XSLT programmers more productive and increase the pace of XML deployment on the web and in cross-business integration."
Under this agreement XMLFund is providing funding and technical expertise to ActiveState for the development of an XSLT IDE, which will be cross-platform and plug into Komodo and a Visual XSLT that will plug into Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET.
About XMLFund: XMLFund was formed in 1999 by David Pool to foster the growth of promising companies that use XML technology. A pioneer in the Internet industry, Pool founded DataChannel in October 1996 to provide the first XML solution for building an Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) and to unleash the power of the enterprise, enabling the mapping of IT strategy with business objectives. In 1989, he founded SPRY Inc., an Internet software company responsible for Internet In A Box, the world's first Internet software suite.
About ActiveState: ActiveState is at the forefront of open source software, providing Internet programming products and services for all popular operating systems and platforms. ActiveState's key technologies are Perl, the Internet's most popular programming language, Python, a user-friendly scripting language, and XSLT, the XML transformation language. ActiveState solutions provide enterprise-wide deployment of open source programming languages, improved programmer productivity, and seamless integration with other technologies.
