WebMacro 1.1 Press Release

Version 1.1 of the WebMacro Open Source web-scripting engine released.

January 13, 2003 -- The WebMacro team (www.webmacro.org) today
released version 1.1 of the WebMacro templating library. A mature
product already used by many web sites and applications, this new
release of WebMacro adds powerful new features as well as improvements
and bug fixes.

WebMacro is an extensible templating engine written in Java, which
can be used in Java Servlets as well as regular Java applications.
What distinguishes WebMacro from most other web scripting technologies
such as Java Server Pages (JSP) is the focus on using pages and output
streams purely for the presentation of dynamic information, leaving
the actual data manipulation in the application where it belongs. This
MVC (Model, View, Controller) approach results in cleaner and easily
maintained applications.

The simple WebMacro scripting language is typically used to produce
HTML output that contains data from a web application, though it is
equally well suited to XML or any plain text output. Directives are
the main "commands" available, and they are deliberately few in number
to keep the language simple. What sets WebMacro's scripting apart
from other templating libraries is that developers are free to add
their own directives to the language without the need to modify the
WebMacro source. The vibrant community of users and developers
contribute a wealth of tools and extensions for other WebMacro users.

This new release includes several major new features, including
support for "macros" which allow the definition of sections of
WebMacro script that can be reused with parameters passed to them.
There is also now support for "global" functions in addition to the
usual object method and property access.

"WebMacro has been an incredibly powerful tool for Open Doors Software in
its development of web pages, java source file generation, and SQL Data
Definition Files. WM magnifies Java into a powerful text processor: the
WM processing language can be learned in about 15 minutes and therefore
adds to the mantra of simplify, simplify, simplify" said Lane Sharman of
Open Doors Software.

Eric Ridge, who uses WebMacro at Technology Concepts & Design, Inc says
he "...would be hungry and homeless if it weren't for WebMacro. tcdi
uses WebMacro to generate everything from webpages to email to
source-code. WebMacro has greatly decreased our development time and
increased our productivity."

Amongst WebMacro's larger users are AltaVista which has been using it
to serve the pages on their site since January 2001.

WebMacro 1.1 is available for free from http://www.webmacro.org

About WebMacro

WebMacro was originally devised and developed by Justin Wells during
1998. The current releases are developed through the joint efforts of
several people from around the world. The core development team
currently has five primary members, with contributions from its many
users. WebMacro has been used on major high-availability server
projects right down to embedded systems with only 32MB RAM and J2ME CDC.