Press Release

Digital Creations and ActiveState Bring Popular Programming Language To Application Server

FREDERICKSBURG, Va., Jan. 25 /PRNewswire/ -- Digital Creations, leaders in time-to-market-focused content management solutions, and ActiveState, suppliers of solutions for user-friendly development, today announced the first release under the Perl for Zope project.

Under this work, ActiveState teamed with Digital Creations to add Perl as a scripting language for Zope, a leading Open Source application server. Perl is one of the dominant programming languages on the Internet today, used globally by individual developers and Fortunate 1000 teams. Zope is written in Python, another popular scripting language that has dramatically grown in the last two years.

``Our customers are intensely excited about the speed-to-market advantages that Zope gives, particularly in content management,'' says Paul Everitt, CEO of Digital Creations. ``Perl remains the dominant language for web programming and fits in nicely with the rapid development model of Zope.''

``The addition of the power and popularity of Perl to Zope has provided an innovative platform for web development,'' says Dick Hardt, Founder and CEO of ActiveState. ``We use Zope internally and find both our Perl and Python programmers like the option of using their language of choice and are therefore more productive with this enterprise-class web application server.''

With this release, Zope sites can add software that embeds Perl into the Zope server. Site developers and designers can write business logic in Perl as well as Python, plus tap into existing Perl code bases. Changes to Perl logic can be instantly deployed across the Zope cluster using Zope's unique ZEO software for distributed transactions.

About Digital Creations

Digital Creations was formed in 1995 as a joint venture with Infinet, itself a joint venture between newspaper chains Gannett, Knight Ridder, and Landmark Communications. Infinet's goal was to bring newspapers online, providing a point of presence on the Web for every newspaper, that could then be resold under the paper's own brand.

Digital Creations was commissioned to develop a classified advertisement engine for the Internet. As part of that work, they developed Bobo, a free toolset for publishing and storing Python objects; Principia, a commercial superset of Bobo aimed at the application server market; and Aqueduct, a commercial package that integrated relational data into the application server. When the partnership with Infinet dissolved in 1997, Digital Creations received the intellectual property rights for the products.

In November 2000, Digital Creations closed a $12 million round of Series C funding, led by Whitney & Co. The funding round is being used to scale the company and build significant strategic partnerships.

About Zope

Zope is the leading Open Source application server for dynamic, high- performance Web services. Zope's unique integrated object database and object model greatly simplify the job of creating and deploying truly impressive Web applications. Zope delivers content management, comprehensive database integration, application development and support for a wide range of operating systems, Web servers and databases.

Since Digital Creations introduced Zope as an Open Source product in late 1998, Zope has quickly become the platform of choice for demanding application developers and content managers. As an Open Source solution, Zope is available free of charge, and comes with complete source code. More information about Zope is available at http://www.zope.org.

Key Customers

Digital Creations has provided high-end solutions for organizations such as newspapers and other media, telecommunications firms, the government, the military, educational institutions, and Internet businesses. Customers include WebMD, the U.S. Navy, HomeGain.com, ZapMedia, Cox Communications, and a major television-broadcasting network.

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. For more information please visit http://www.ActiveState.com.