For Immediate Release

Contact:
Steve Sears
Product Marketing Manager
ssears@franz.com
510-452-2000 x.154

Franz, Inc. Announces open sourcing of their Allegro WebActions facility for generating dynamic web pages at the 2003 International Lisp Conference in New York.

Oakland, CA , October 15, 2003 - Franz Inc. today, announced their decision to open source Allegro WebActions to the attendees of the 2003 International Lisp Conference in New York City. Allegro WebActions, built on top of AllegroServe (Franz Inc.'s Open Source Lisp-based web server), provides a framework for building web applications that are easy to maintain and update. It has been used by Franz's customers since July this year. "I now started to play with AllegroServe and the WebActions. Amazing is the only word I can find to describe this experience! In less than a day I had a web gateway to our server, allowing a user to load a small database and compute a histogram on some parameters", said Laurent Eschenauer, a software developer for PEPITe S.A. in Belgium.

The International Lisp Conference, ILC, is a modern software technology conference that promotes today's most powerful programming languages and paradigms within different environments. The themes of ILC 2003 are bold, interesting and challenging. The conference consists of one full day of tutorials and three days of keynote and general sessions on topics ranging from Intelligent Web Applications, Telecommunications, Financial Applications, AI, and Agents to Robotics. "We have consistently looked toward Franz for technology leadership in the commercial sector. Now that WebActions is made open source, we expect to see it rapidly employed in the portable AllegroServe web server, running on many of the commercial and free Common Lisp implementations", said conference organizer, Raymond de Lacaze.

Franz Inc., based in Oakland, California, is the leading vendor of dynamic object-oriented development tools featuring Allegro Common Lisp and CLOS. Allegro CL, a Common Lisp development environment, makes it easier and more cost-effective than ever to develop and deploy fast, flexible, scalable, internet-ready applications. Commercial companies such as France Telecom, Cadence and Boeing have all made Allegro CL their development solution of choice. Leveraging the natural object-oriented capabilities of Lisp with the accessibility of the Internet, Allegro CL has evolved into a comprehensive suite of development tools - applicable in domains ranging from multimedia web development to biotech systems to financial programs and more. Founded in 1984 and privately held, Franz Inc. has demonstrated consistent growth and profitability since its inception. All founders remain actively involved with the company.