Interesting news on the open source infrastructure front. For me, I tend to think of the grid game being played by the larger vendors like Oracle, Sun, etc. When I think of open source application servers, I think of open source players like JBoss.

Well here's some info in the grid application server space from a early-stage venture. According to VentureWire and Peter Yarad's blog, ActiveGrid just nabbed $10 million in a pre-emptive round (which could mean that the existing, significant financers put in extra money to prevent dilution ... I did not trace through all documents here). Here's some info on the ActiveGrid product from their website:

The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is a next-generation application server designed to scale applications across horizontal grids of commodity computers. The ActiveGrid Grid Application Server is built on top of the open source LAMP stack. In contrast to traditional three-tier architectures, where statically defined applications are bound to a particular deployment architecture, the ActiveGrid Grid Application Server interprets applications at runtime and can deploy them using a variety of proven deployment models and multiple data caching patterns. The result is a system that provides unprecedented levels of flexibility, scalability and economy.

I also find it interesting that the application builder for ActiveGrid uses BPEL (which I mentioned at the end of last month). How that application flow is actually orchestrated on the back end is interesting to think about. Can't really tell from the diagram on the website, but Jon Udell also appears to have some comments on the bindings at the end of this article.

Steve Shu