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ActiveGrid Inc. has released the early-access version of its open-source grid application server, combining XML, open-source and grid computing technology.
The San Francisco company made its LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/ Perl)-based technology available via The Apache Software Foundations Apache License 2.0. The new products consist of ActiveGrid Application Builder and ActiveGrid Grid Application Server, according to Peter Yared, ActiveGrids founder and chief executive.
ActiveGrid Application Builder is a rapid- application-development environment based on an XML programming model. The tool supports standards such as XML Schema; XML Path Language, or XPath; BPEL (Business Process Execution Language); and XForms, said Jeff Veis, vice president of business development at ActiveGrid.
In addition to PHP, Python and Perl, the development environment supports Java.
ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is built on top of the LAMP stack and is designed to scale applications across horizontal grids. It runs as an Apache module on Linux and can scale to 1,024 nodes, Yared said.
The two open-source products will be available as 1.0 versions in the third quarter, Veis said. Meanwhile, ActiveGrid plans to release a data-center-class version of Grid Application Server in the second half of the year, Veis said.
The companys open-source approach and XML standards focus let customers avoid vendor lock-in, Yared said.
“We couldnt have done this without being a part of the open-source community,” Yared said. However, when pitching the technology to customers, he said, “were going to, not in a tentative way, ask for a commercial license.”
Mike Gilpin, an analyst with Forrester Research Inc., in Cambridge, Mass., said: “The unique thing I think they have done is create an easier-to-use, more declarative—and therefore more maintainable—programming model for the kind of scale-out LAMP server farms that are already proven as a good Web platform. This, combined with the facilities for data distribution and caching, [offers] a good example of what the next iteration of lightweight Web infrastructure looks like.”