The Apache Software Foundation today announced the launch of the Apache Tcl project, with the goal of promoting the integration of the Apache web server with the Tcl scripting language.

Tcl (tool command language, pronounced "tickle") is an open-source, cross-platform scripting language Tcl has a strong history of use for the web, with products such as AOLserver, and the widely used StoryServer. Combined with Apache, the world's most popular web server, Tcl will make an excellent companion for back-end scripting tasks.

"Tcl is a great language for the web - it's small, light, easy to learn, and has been used, developed and tested for a number of years" said David Welton, vice president of Apache Tcl and author of mod_dtcl. "It also has a large user base, and is a very active open source project in its own right."

tcl.apache.org will serve as a point of reference for Apache-Tcl efforts, initially hosting the mod_dtcl project, a fast and light implementation of Tcl for Apache. The project was initially modeled after PHP, a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language.

About Tcl

Tcl, was created by John K. Ousterhout at the University of California at Berkeley in 1988. Originally conceived as a reusable, embeddable language core for tools being developed by Dr. Ousterhout and his colleagues, it has come to be much more. Tcl is used today in a wide variety of applications including web scripting, test automation, network/system management, EDA and CAD, and in many other fields.

For more information about Tcl, see http://dev.scriptics.com.

About the Apache Software Foundation

Founded in June 1999, the Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects. Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and financial support, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source projects.

For more information on the Apache Software Foundation, please see http://www.apache.org/.