Based on Perl 5.6, ActivePerl 5.6 is a significantly enhanced distribution, encompassing the new features available in Perl 5.6.

ActivePerl software is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Java[tm] 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE[tm] which provides a fully modular and easily extensible environment that delivers integrated visual design, editing, compilation, and debugging capabilities to create applets and Web-enabled applications.

The Windows package provides additional features to take advantage of that platform.

As part of ActiveState's support for Perl, ActiveState provides the ActivePerl binary packages free to the community.

In addition to the core binary code, ActivePerl 5.6 includes the following for all platforms: Perl Package Manager (PPM) - ActiveState's Perl extension installer and manager. PPM allows for easy installation and management of modules and extensions.

Installer - Various platform-specific and ActiveState Installers are available for each platform. Each allows for quick installation of the ActivePerl 5.6 package.

Documentation - Online documentation is included as part of the ActivePerl package. The ActivePerl Windows package also includes: Perl for ISAPI - this IIS plug-in enhances the speed of standard Perl. CGI PerlScript - ActiveX scripting engine for Perl.

All platform builds of ActivePerl 5.6 contain: Concurrent Interpreters; Granularity of warnings; New regex constructs; Lvalue subroutines; Subroutine attributes;