VANCOUVER, British Columbia – July 9, 2003 – ActiveState, the leader in professional programming tools for open source developers, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2003 Active Awards, presented July 8, 2003, at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon.

The Active Awards are held annually to honor members of the open source community who *actively* contribute to open languages and display excellence in their programming efforts. The categories include each of ActiveState's key technologies: Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and XSLT.

Programmers' Choice Award winners were nominated and chosen by the open source community. Activators' Choice Award winners were chosen by ActiveState's development team.

The Programmers Choice winners are:

  • Perl – Tim Bunce is a core Perl developer and author and maintainer of the DBI, DBD::Oracle, and Oracle::OCI
  • PHP – Stig Bakken is the father of PEAR, the PHP Extension and Application Repository, which had its 1.0 release in December 2002.
  • Python – Mark Hammond is the author of many of the Windows extensions for Python, and co-author of the COM framework and extensions.
  • XSLT –  Uche Ogbuji & Mike Olson are developers of 4Suite, an XSLT processor and XSLT-based server framework; and contributors to the XPath and XSLT components of PyXML. They write extensively on XPath, XSLT and Python. Ogbuji is co-founder of the EXSLT and XPath NG projects.

The Activators Choice winners are:

  • Perl – Ilya Zakharevich is a prolific contributor of ideas and code to the Perl 5 project over the years. A candid, colorful, and almost constant presence on Perl Usenet groups and the Perl 5 developers' mailing list, he has deeply affected the way Perl "gets the job done." Perl has its unique regex features, neat operator overloading, sane numerics, and insanely useful debugger features thanks to Ilya.
  • PHP – Ilia Alshanetsky is a member of PHPs QA team, who spends countless hours closing bugs and generally making PHP better. He's also the lead developer of the successful fudforum software package, and has made major contributions to several popular extensions such as GD, ncurses, and shared memory support.
  • Python –  Martin von L wis has displayed doggedness and quiet determination at dealing with some of the most unrewarding yet crucial tasks in development. Notable examples include shepherding bugs through their lifecycle from submission to resolution, helping Python and Tk work well together, pushing Python to support as much Unicode as reasonable, and answering many questions on Python's internals on mailing lists.
  • XSLT – Ken Holman has been an active participant in several standardization efforts for various structed text technologies, including XML, XSLT, and DSSSL; has written several papers and books in the field, most notably a book on XSL-FO; and is an active educator.

Tcl winners will be announced later this summer at the 10th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference. Congratulations to all our nominees, and thanks to everyone who participated!