VANCOUVER, British Columbia – May 7, 2001 – ActiveState, the leader in open source programming, announces the release of PerlEx 2.0. A plug-in for NT Webservers, PerlEx 2.0 enables programmers to easily create and deploy Web services. PerlEx allows Perl to function more efficiently on a Windows based web server by lowering web page delivery times and decreasing CPU load. The impact of Web services is similar to that of Perl CGI scripting in the early days of the Internet,” stated Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, ActiveState. PerlEx will be helpful even to programmers with only minimal knowledge of the new Web services standards. They can create and deploy new services by simply writing the Perl code that embodies that service and then deploying it to PerlEx, which generates WSDL on-the-fly for them.

Key Benefits of PerlEx 2.0:

  • Web services support. Easily build & deploy Web services that utilize SOAP.
  • Fast. Building on earlier versions it can speed up Perl CGI programs by as much as 50x.
  • Script Caching. Eliminate startup time in your Perl CGI programs.
  • Persistent data connections. Allows you to keep data connections open, dramatically improving performance speed in web applications.
  • Instrumentation tools. With the Windows NT Performance Monitor, you can monitor system resource usage and performance.

"PerlEx 2.0 brings deploying Web services into the realm of the trivial," said Gurusamy Sarathy, PerlEx Project Lead. "PerlEx helps web developers publish existing modules as Web services and efficiently dispatch SOAP and XML-RPC requests."

"Systems should be kept as simple as possible and with PerlEx we can do any integration. From PerlEx we connect to the database, make socket connections to proprietary apps and shell out command line apps. The beauty of this is that we can do it from one language, relatively simply and efficiently thus lowering development cost and time," said Douglas Anderson, CTO at a US trading firm.

PerlEx 2.0 is $395/CPU. Upgrading to PerlEx 2.0 is free for registered users of earlier versions of PerlEx. PerlEx 2.0 is compatible with Windows NT and Windows 2000.

About ActiveState:

ActiveState is the leading provider of open source based programming products and services for cross-platform development. ActiveState's key technologies are Perl, the Internet's most popular programming language; Python and Tcl, user-friendly scripting languages; PHP, the dynamic Web programming language; and XSLT, the XML transformation language. The ActiveState Programmer Network (ASPN) offers these technologies with the latest information and productivity tools, empowering programmers with the freedom to work with their preferred language and development environment. Media & Analyst Contacts: Lori Pike, ActiveState

© ActiveState Corporation 2001.

ActiveState, PerlEx, and ASPN are trademarks of ActiveState Corp. All other company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.