Companion BV introduced Companion, a new tool for web development and management. Companion addresses the needs of professional web developers confronted with the ever-increasing challenge of managing web sites. Based on a component-based model, Companion comes with a complete set of features for development and organized maintenance of medium-sized to large-sized web sites. The beta version of Companion 2.0 is available now at http://www.companion.nl. The definitive release of Companion 2.0 is scheduled for June 1999. Contrary to other web management systems, Companion adopts a ‘true’ component model. Components in Companion are not mere boilerplate code fragments to be ‘re-used’ with a copy-and-paste routine. Rather they are ‘programmable bricks’ that interact with and adapt to the context they are used in. A web developer can de-compose the web site into reusable segments of code, to any desired level of granularity. A component could contain a complete page, a page element (e.g. a navigation bar), a query script, a javascript, or whatever segment of code the developer wants to reuse within the web site. The web developer can assign any number of parameters to any component, in order to increase its reusability. Components can contain any combination of HTML, DHTML, JavaScript, VBScript or ASP. They are created and maintained with a script editor supporting features such as Syntax Coloring, Auto Completion, context sensitive Syntax Tips, and Drag and Drop editing. www.companion.nl