JPL NOW OPEN SOURCE

One of the major initiatives of Larry Wall at O'Reilly & Associates was to develop JPL -- a Perl interface to Java. JPL plays off the acronym of the place where Larry and Perl got its start: the Jet Propulsion Laboratories (JPL). However, this new JPL stands for Java/Perl Lingo. Until now, Wall's JPL has been available exclusively in O'Reilly & Associates' Perl Resource Kit-UNIX Edition, a commercial product. Now JPL is freely available as open source software.

JPL allows Perl programmers to tap into Java and use Java when Java's the right tool to use. Just as importantly, it allows Java programmers to use Perl when Perl's the right tool to use, especially for text processing. JPL enables programmers to implement Java methods with Perl, and for Perl code to access Java via the Java Native Interface (JNI). It includes a translator and build system to make it easy to create JPL applications.

The JPL tool and its source code are available as part of the latest development release of Perl (version 5.005_54).

"O'Reilly has been a strong supporter of open source software, so releasing JPL as open source matches our company values," said Gina Blaber, Director of O'Reilly's Software Products. "JPL will benefit from the attention of the broader development community."

O'Reilly first released the Perl Resource Kit-UNIX in November, 1997, and followed it in August with the Perl Resource Kit-Win32 Edition.