Engage Interactive Opens the Door to Open Source

Programmers at Engage Interactive, a learning technology firm in New Brunswick, offer free Open Source tools on their web site, and promise more to come.

(PRWEB) February 20, 2004 --Its the closest that computer programming comes to art," said John Heinstein, VP of Software Development for Fredericton-based eLearning company, Engage Interactive.

Mr. Heinstein is one of a growing number of software developers who want to give something of value to the programming community...free of charge.

Its a huge community of programmers developing code for various platforms." said Mr. Heinstein. And then they give it away. They post it at places like SourceForge (sourceforge.net) or FreshMeat (freshmeat.net) where it can be used by anyone, anywhere in the world."

Engage's open source efforts have centered around extending the PHP programming language, which is used to develop web-based products. PHP is free, fast and available on a wide range of platforms.

PHP meets the criteria for our development philosophy," said Mr. Heinstein. It keeps prices low, works on many platforms, and it keeps our products robust, yet efficient. However, one of its drawbacks it that it does not have well-developed XML parsing abilities."

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a text-based data storage standard that is central to modern web-based technologies. Parsers are programs that process XML so that the data can be accessed and manipulated.

We have developed two open source tools to address XML parsing limitations of PHP" said Mr. Heinstein. We call them SAXY and DOMIT! SAXY is a SAX (Simple API for XML) parser and DOMIT! is a DOM (Document Object Model) parser."

SAXY provides a fast way to process XML, while DOMIT! processes XML as an object-oriented tree structure, giving it more flexibility in data manipulation. Its the defacto standard for XML parsing," said Mr. Heinstein.

Engage is also working on a third open source tool, ClassyDoc, which will be available in early 2004.

Its a tool for documenting object-oriented PHP code using DOMIT!," said Mr. Heinstein. Its an automated documentation builder that takes an XML description of a set of classes and pumps out ready-made documentation. Well be making it available just as soon as weve finished testing it thoroughly and have created documentation for its use."

When asked why Engage programmers contribute their time and abilities to the Open Source Movement, Mr. Heinstein said: We use open source products. This is our way of giving something back. Plus, its a matter of principle, a belief that its good to share ideas. When these ideas are brought together on a mass scale on the Internet, they form a huge pool of resources thats available to everybody."

These tools are just the beginning of our commitment to the Open Source Movement," said Mr. Heinstein. There are lots more to come."