ActiveGrid Inc. on Monday will announce an early-access release of its open source enterprise application platform that will leverage PC-based computing grids and will include an application server not based on Java.
The company"s software will instead be based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) open source stack. Both open source and commercial versions of ActiveGrid products will be offered.
Now available for download are early-access releases of the LAMP-based Grid Application Server, Open Source Edition, and the open source ActiveGrid Application Builder, Open Source Edition, development environment. The shipping Version 1.0 releases of the products are due at the end of the quarter and will be available under Apache Software License 2.0.
Whereas the Java language has become synonymous with application servers, ActiveGrid is set to buck the trend. The product, however, can be integrated with Java systems, with the ability to call business logic written as EJB. With its platform, ActiveGrid is leveraging grid computing, open source, and XML, according to the company.
Most companies run J2EE application servers on four- to 16-way machines, whereas "next-generation" service-driven organizations such as Google, Yahoo, and Amazon run large clusters of little machines in grids, said Peter Yared, founder and CEO of ActiveGrid. "That was the opportunity for us at ActiveGrid. We package grid, open source LAMP, and XML together in such a way that was accessible to corporate developers."
ActiveGrid Application Server is a deployment platform designed to scale applications across horizontal grids of commodity computers, the company said. The product is implemented as an Apache Module running on Linux and is designed to scale in a linear fashion to as many as 1,024 nodes. Applications are interpreted at run time.
In the second half of the year, ActiveGrid plans to introduce a commercially licensed, datacenter-grade version of Grid Application Server. The commercial product will feature proprietary extensions such as dynamic data caching and the ability to adapt transactions at run time, enabling, for example, preferential treatment of a premier customer"s transactions.
The early-access release of ActiveGrid Application Server, Commercial Edition is due in the second quarter, with the shipping Version 1.0 release to follow.
ActiveGrid Application Builder is a rapid application development environment based on XML programming, adhering to XML standards such as XML Schema, XPath, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), and XForms. Supporting the PHP, Python, Perl, and Java programming languages, the tool sports a declarative approach to enable scaling of mainstream business applications across a transaction grid, the company said. Application Builder runs atop Windows, Linux, and Macintosh clients.
ActiveGrid with its Java-less application server platform is "interesting," said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group. "I think a lot of people are very happy to write Web pages using Perl/PHP/Python."
Perl, PHP and Python are good for manipulating text and not very good for building complex transactions, Thomas said. "Meanwhile, I think Java is awful for manipulating text," but great for transactions, she said.
Not all Web sites perform complex transactions, and technologies are available to assist PHP, Perl, and Python with transactional applications, according to Thomas. ActiveGrid"s platform also could serve as a front end to Java application servers, she added.
ActiveGrid plans to sell support plans for its Application Builder and open source Grid Application Server. The company has not yet set pricing for its products.