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Open source Java will aid scripting, says ActiveGrid CEO

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

ActiveGrid has released an update to its tool set which aims to bring LAMP development closer to Java.

With ActiveGrid Studio 2.0 and ActiveGrid Server 2.0, the company has made updates to the Jython project to have Python applications run on the Java virtual machine.

The reason ActiveGrid made contributions to the Jython project was to make ActiveGrid LAMP applications easier to deploy within companies, said CEO Peter Yared.

Rather than installing a new Linux server with the Apache Web server, MySQL and the Python runtime, customers can deploy a new ActiveGrid application on an existing Java application server, he said. The ActiveGrid software can now run inside a Java container, such as Tomcat, he said.

"You get the rapid application development and the Web 2.0 nature of LAMP but you get to deploy it on an existing infrastructure," Yared said.

Yared argued that scripting languages should use the Java virtual machine, rather than each have their own separate virtual machines.

"The best case scenario for the industry is that we all share one virtual machine that is open source and is good," Yared said, noting that Microsoft has a multi-language runtime for .Net applications.

Having an open-source Java virtual machine--something Sun Microsystems said it intends to do--will foster better JVMs for scripting languages, Yared said.

"What happens now is that you have developers living in their own toolsÂ…Now with Jython, we can host the Python application in a Java server as a peer," he said.