Three Trends Converging toward the Service-Driven Enterprise
Businesses are evolving with a mix of agility, cost savings, and new services. Forward-thinking companies like Google, Amazon, and Sabre have shifted to the service-driven enterprise based on three technology trends: XML, open source, and grid computing. These technologies are enabling unprecedented levels of new service creation and cost savings. Until now, this approach has required handcrafted design by in-house experts. ActiveGrid has now productized these best practices so all enterprises can enjoy these benefits.
"The LAMP platform offers a low-cost and highly productive programming environment, particularly for XML-based applications. But without a LAMP-enabled application server, only the most technologically advanced companies are able to make these systems Internet-scalable," said Anne Thomas Manes, vice president and research director at Burton Group, an industry analyst firm. "A grid-based application server architecture makes highly scalable LAMP technology accessible to the average IT organization, and it enables automatic distribution of application load across a farm of low-cost commodity hardware."
To date, grids have been used primarily for specialized research and scientific applications. ActiveGrid board member Mitchell Kertzman, of Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, explains, "The transaction grid is the latest evolution of grid computing. It clusters up to thousands of horizontally scaled commodity computers that work together to handle mainstream business applications. A transaction grid hosts all applications as Web Services, simplifying the development of composite applications and enabling them to be deployed, scaled, and managed across a grid. This innovative approach reaps huge cost savings when compared with traditional application server deployment."
Open Source Release Targets Corporate and Independent Developers
ActiveGrid users are developing and deploying service-driven enterprise applications for transaction-intensive industries, such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, business and consumer services, and manufacturing. "ActiveGrid is excited to provide leading-edge technologies to corporate and independent developers," comments Peter Yared, founder and CEO of ActiveGrid. "After almost two years of development, we feel our early-access release will give developers an opportunity to rapidly develop applications on the LAMP platform."
Today's early-access open source release comprises the following:
- ActiveGrid Application Builder -- The ActiveGrid Application Builder is a rapid application development environment based on a native XML programming model that enables developers to graphically and interactively create, test, and deploy composite enterprise applications. It supports key XML standards such as XML Schema (business objects), XPath (database queries), BPEL (business process), and XForms (user interface rendering). This declarative approach enables the scaling of mainstream business applications across a transaction grid, and supports PHP, Python, Perl, and Java programming languages. The Application Builder is designed to run on top of Windows, Linux, and Macintosh clients.
- ActiveGrid Grid Application Server -- The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is an application deployment platform designed to scale applications across horizontal grids of commodity computers. In contrast to traditional three-tiered architectures, where statically defined applications are bound to a particular deployment architecture, the Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can deploy them using a variety of proven deployment models and multiple data caching patterns. The Grid Application Server is implemented as an Apache Module running on the Linux operating system and is designed to
scale
- linearly to up to 1,024-node grids.
ActiveGrid addresses this innovation gap by adhering to XML industry standards to simplify interoperability and eliminate vendor lock-in. A developer can download the Application Builder and be up and running within 15 minutes, thanks to its integrated Web server and database for rapid, iterative development. Mainstream corporate developers no longer have to be concerned with choosing a particular deployment architecture before writing an application, freeing them to focus their energies where they have the greatest impact -- application and service creation. Applications can be deployed at thousands of Internet Service Providers that host the LAMP platform as well as to internal grids of commodity computers.
Product Availability
Early-access versions of the ActiveGrid Application Builder and Grid Application Server are available immediately through an Apache 2.0 open source license.
ActiveGrid plans to introduce a commercially licensed, data center-grade version of the Grid Application Server in the second half of 2005. ActiveGrid will offer fee-based, enterprise-class support and consulting services for all versions.
--CM
