VANCOUVER, British Columbia – November 3, 2000 – ActivePerl 5.6, ActiveState's free binary distribution of Perl, has been voted the best programming tool by WebTechniques Readers in the annual Web Tools Award. Readers were most impressed with ActivePerl's ability to develop within an ASP environment and still have access to what made Perl popular in the first place: pattern matching and regular expressions, the Perl built-in functions, and a vast library of free or low-cost Perl modules to use in your code.

The Web Tools Awards recognize the most innovative proprietary and open source products used in every stage of the Web development and maintenance process: strategy, design, programming, and infrastructure. The judges felt ActivePerl managed to convince Perl developers to begin building sites with Active Server Pages. Special thanks to Gurusamy Sarathy, Senior Developer, ActiveState and the Perl 5 Porters for all their hard work. Congratulations!

"We're honored to receive this award from Web programmers. The Perl 5.6 Pumpking, Gurusamy Sarathy, did a great job ensuring that ActivePerl 5.6 is both more powerful and easier to use," said Dick Hardt, ActiveState Founder and CEO. "We look forward to furthering ActivePerl's ease and programmer productivity with a new ActivePerl reference guide coming out this fall."

"The ActivePerl 5.6 release marks a new level of portability 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. Some of these major features include: precompiled PPM repositories for all three major platforms, ability to run concurrent interpreters, better 64-bit and large filesystem support, new regular expression constructs, and tutorials on various subjects. In addition, Windows users now have access to fork() functionality, 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 Linux, Solaris and Windows 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." ActivePerl 5.6 is ActiveState's value added, binary distribution of Perl for the Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems, which is now faster, easier to install and offers more support for Web developers.

Download Perl Binaries | ActivePerl here.

About WebTechniques: WebTechniques is dedicated to providing solutions that empower Internet professionals, giving them the resources to turn Internet strategies into reality. Their coverage of programming is focused on technology and techniques, which serve as robust solutions for creating enterprise-strength applications. The Web Tools winners were announced on November 2, 2000. For more details go to WebTechniques.