Scriptics Unveils Tcl 8.1, Industry’s First Enterprise-Class
Scripting Solution
Major Release of Open Source Tcl Scripting Language Delivers
Scalability, New Functionality and Internationalization to Meet
Enterprise Scripting Requirements
Mountain View, Calif. – May 10, 1999 – Scriptics Corporation,
the Tcl platform company led by Tcl creator John Ousterhout, today
announced a major new open source version of the Tcl scripting
language. The new release of Tcl provides significant new
functionality, including support for multi-threaded applications
and internationalization, and a more sophisticated regular
expression package. These new features establish Tcl as the
industry’s first scripting solution capable of handling
enterprise-scale application integration tasks. The new software is
freely available as open source technology through the Scriptics
Web site and other sources, underscoring Scriptics’ commitment to
the open source process and the Tcl developer community.
The software development community has eagerly awaited the new
release of the Tcl scripting language. Over 40,000 developers have
already downloaded alpha or beta versions of the new Tcl 8.1
software.
“We are pleased that Scriptics has added multi-threading to
Tcl,” said Jim Davidson, Chief Technology Officer at AOL’s Digital
City. “Digital City uses Tcl to reach more than 4.5 million people
each month through our interactive Web site distributed on AOL.com,
CompuServe, Netscape’s Netcenter and MCI Worldcom Internet. Tcl is
the foundation for our service and performance is a very important
issue. We have experimented with adding multi-threading to the Tcl
core on our own, and we are already working on multi-threading Tcl
extensions for Tcl 8.1. Tcl has enabled Digital City to deploy
sophisticated Web functionality faster than anticipated, and Tcl
8.1 will allow us to use Tcl on an even wider range of application
requirements.”
This major announcement from Scriptics offers true enterprise
technology, moving Tcl forward significantly with high-end
functionality for corporate developers. With Tcl 8.1, Scriptics
continues to invest in open source Tcl software, keeping its
commitment to the Tcl community. This release will be quickly and
broadly distributed to the Tcl developer community via the Web,
mirror sites around the world, and various 3rd party distributors.
Scriptics continues to combine commercial and open source software
to provide developers with cutting-edge technology.
Tcl 8.1 provides developers with a number of capabilities that
are essential for many corporate applications. These features are
typically not found in other scripting languages. With support for
thread safety, Tcl can now be compiled for use in multi-threaded
applications. Multi-threading provides significantly greater
performance, by allowing different parts, or threads, of an
application to run simultaneously on multiple processors.
‘In the past, developers have had to choose between
ease-of-development and application performance,’ said John
Ousterhout, Tcl creator and CEO of Scriptics. ‘While many corporate
developers want to use scripting for high-throughput applications,
they have been forced to use C or C++ on these tasks for
performance reasons. With Tcl multi-threading support, developers
can now enjoy the rapid development and extensibility benefits of
Tcl and high-end performance application execution at the same
time.’
With the new release, Tcl is now fully internationalized,
offering support for the international Unicode character set
(UTF-8). Developers can create Tcl applications that support any
multi-byte language, including Chinese and Japanese. Tcl 8.1
greatly simplifies the task of localizing applications, and makes
it possible for developers to deploy both commercial and enterprise
network applications on a global scale. Tcl is the first
cross-platform scripting language to allow developers to create
fully international applications.
Finally, Tcl 8.1 significantly improves the way Tcl developers
work with regular expressions, functionality also known as pattern
matching. The ability of a scripting language to recognize and
extract data from systems and processes helps developers create
applications, manage systems and create reports. Tcl 8.1 offers
several new regular expression options, giving developers more
sophisticated capabilities and reducing the programming time of
many common tasks. Tcl 8.1 also provides significantly improved
pattern matching performance.
About Tcl
Created in the late 1980s by software visionary John Ousterhout,
Tcl is a popular open source scripting language. Tcl has been
downloaded over a million times since its initial release in 1990,
and is currently being downloaded over 40,000 times each month. Tcl
and the Tk GUI extension enable developers to quickly and easily
create applications that are both powerful and easy to extend. Tcl
can be embedded in other applications, and is often used to
integrate disparate software technologies, including GUIs,
middleware, existing software components, and Internet and
networking protocols. Many common application integration tasks can
be implemented 5-10 times faster with Tcl than with a traditional
system programming language. Tcl has won the prestigious ACM
Software System Award, which is presented each year for ‘a software
system that has had a lasting influence,’ and the USENIX Software
Tools User Group (STUG) Award, given each year in recognition of an
outstanding software tool.
Practical Details
Tcl 8.1 is available immediately as an open source product from the
Scriptics Web site – www.scriptics.com. An evaluation
version of TclPro for Tcl/Tk 8.1 will also be available soon from
the Scriptics Web site.
About Scriptics Scriptics is the Tcl platform
company. Founded by Tcl creator John Ousterhout, Scriptics provides
commercial development tools, extensions, and support and training
services, as well as open source core technology for the Tcl
community. The company’s goal is to make Tcl the preeminent,
unifying platform for creating applications that integrate diverse
components, applications, and protocols. The Tcl scripting language
has over 500,000 developers, with heavy usage in the
telecommunications, Web, healthcare, financial services, and EDA
industries.
Scriptics has secured financial backing from leading Silicon
Valley venture capitalists Accel Partners and has formed strategic
relationships with a broad range of global corporations, including
Cisco, AOL’s Digital City, Motorola, Synopsys, and Vignette. More
information on Scriptics and Tcl can be found at www.scriptics.com.
# # #