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'LAMP' start-up warms to free DB2

ActiveGrid releases lastest open-source tool set for building front ends to business applicatons.

Martin LaMonica Former Staff writer, CNET News
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer covering green tech and cutting-edge technologies. He joined CNET in 2002 to cover enterprise IT and Web development and was previously executive editor of IT publication InfoWorld.
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Martin LaMonica
Start-up ActiveGrid has released an update to its tool set for building business applications with open-source software, adding support for IBM's newly introduced free DB2 database.

The company made version 1.5 of its ActiveGrid's Application Builder and LAMP Application Server available for download on Wednesday.

ActiveGrid has built software to take advantage of the popularity of the so-called LAMP stack of open-source software, which includes Linux, the Apache Web server, MySQL database and scripting languages, such as Perl, PHP and Python.

The company has signed on a handful of customers, including Pfizer Pharmaceutical, that are building business applications using LAMP instead of closed-source infrastructure software.

ActiveGrid's software is primarily designed to build Web front-ends to access back-end systems, said CEO Peter Yared.

"We talked to a lot of enterprises that spent lot of money building a service-oriented architecture and they're (saying) that the lines of businesses cannot build applications that connect to back ends," Yared said.

With version 1.5, ActiveGrid has developed an edition of its front-end development tool and server software to work with IBM's DB2 Express-C, a free database aimed at preventing customers from using freely available, open-source databases.

The ActiveGrid update also introduces a mechanism to tie new applications into existing identity management systems to provide personalized Web pages, Yared said.

ActiveGrid sells a high-end version of its server, which costs between $8,000 and $12,000 per machine. It releases a less capable, open-source version of its server and its development tool for free.