VANCOUVER, British Columbia – October 23, 2001 – ActiveState and members of the open source community, announced today at the Web Services Edge Conference, the Simple Web Service API. This is a standard method for scripting languages to access Web services described with the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). For the first time, leading developers from the Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl communities are working together to create a common solution. With ActiveState coordinating their activities, a consistent, high quality implementation will be available sooner to the millions of programmers that use these languages. A beta implementation of the Simple Web Services API is available for download for Python, Perl and PHP, with support for Ruby and Tcl coming soon. This will make Web service scripting easy for the millions of programmers that rely on one or more of these languages. Scripting languages are ideal for consuming Web services due to their ease of use, rapid development, and availability on all popular computing platforms.
"Web services will create a programmable Web, the next step in the evolution of Internet technology. In the future, Web services will be the primary technology for integrating applications," said Dick Hardt, CEO & Founder, ActiveState. "We are making programming easier and more accessible with our contributions to the Simple Web Service API and the support for Web services that we're putting into our products."
ActiveState has products that make it easier to both develop and deploy Web services. Programmers targeting Microsoft IIS can easily publish their Perl code as Web services using PerlEx, which will generate the necessary WSDL and glue code. Komodo, Visual Perl and Visual Python let programmers quickly build and consume Web services in Perl, Python and PHP. By dragging and dropping WSDL files into these development tools, Simple Web Service API initialization code is automatically generated, and IntelliSense and class browsing is then provided.
"I'm glad to see ActiveState presenting the Simple Web Service API at the Web Services Edge Conference. Web services are an important technology, and one we're sure to be using for years into the future. We'll only realize its engineering promise, though, as we marry it to such highly-productive, industrial-strength languages as Tcl, Perl, PHP, and Python. That's the task ActiveState has set for this initiative, and more generally for itself: to help programmers use advanced scripting methods to deliver results quicker and more reliably," said Cameron Laird, network developer and author.
"The scripting languages have always had a friendly rivalry but we're not afraid to learn from each other. For the first time, we've begun working together on new technologies early in their development. By integrating great ideas from many sources we're developing something much more functional and coherent than from working singularly," said Paul Prescod, ActiveState.
About Web Services:
A Web service is a business function a company makes online to customers, partners, or internally via XML-based messaging (SOAP) and programming interfaces. Web services make integrating applications easier than other means of distributed computing and thus allow businesses to extend existing systems to others without having to rearchitect existing back-end infrastructure. 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 Contact: Lori Pike, ActiveState
