Perl is a language that has been around for a while and is one of the most popular open source languages among system administrators, Web developers and the research community. Meanwhile, Microsoft's .NET technology, which is comprised of a framework and set of tools, was recently released for creating sophisticated applications. Is it possible to have any connection between these two different worlds? Yes it is! Perl is now a .NET language. This is the first of a two-part series written to introduce and explore the tools and technologies that are giving Perl and .NET a new dimension.
by Srinivasan Manickam,
Michael Saltzman
October 21, 2002
erlNET, the technology that is part of ActiveState's Perl Development Kit, provides .NET access to thousands of Perl modules written over years. This opens up the feature rich .NET Framework with Perl.
Every once in a while a language comes along that gains the hype of the programming literati. In recent years, Java and now C# have stolen many of the headlines. However, for the past twenty years, there has been a programmer's diamond in the rough: Perl. When Larry Wall created this language in the early 1980's, it quickly became the language of choice for system administrators. With the growth of the Internet and, in particular, dynamic content, it has been the language of choice for Common Gateway Interface (CGI) applications. Now, with the introduction of .NET from Microsoft and PerlNET from ActiveState, Perl has become one of the standard .NET languages. Perl is an Open Source Language; however, PerlNET is also a commercially licensed technology. In this and the second article of this series, I'll explore this interesting transformation of Perl into a .NET language.
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erlNET, the technology that is part of ActiveState's Perl Development Kit, provides .NET access to thousands of Perl modules written over years. This opens up the feature rich .NET Framework with Perl.
