ActiveGrid announced the release of ActiveGrid Studio 2.0, a development environment specifically engineered for enterprise Web 2.0 application development. The company also announced the release of ActiveGrid Server 2.0, an application server that allows companies to deploy Web 2.0 apps across 'lightweight,' commodity machines -- the same winning application architecture formula proven out by Internet leaders such as Google, Yahoo and Amazon.

ActiveGrid Studio 2.0 is now the first enterprise solution on the market that rolls AJAX, mash-ups, and the ability to take advantage of exposed back-ends in SOA architectures into a development tool that's easy to use and optimized for common enterprise configurations.

"There's been a ton of hype around Web 2.0, 'mash-ups,' and AJAX for a couple of years now, but ActiveGrid has become the first vendor to actually release the type of development and deployment tools that make these cool new web apps accessible to developers at Global 2000 companies," said Peter Yared, CEO at ActiveGrid. "We're about to see Web 2.0 make a big jump from its consumer web site origins into primetime enterprise application development."

After calling on Sun to open source Java, ActiveGrid has also added numerous updates to the "Jython" project that runs Python within the Java virtual machine, and is bringing the best of the Web 2.0 LAMP technology to Java servers such as Apache Tomcat, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Sun Java System Application Server, and JBOSS. ActiveGrid developers can now code in Python, PHP, or Java, and are able to deploy applications to either Apache or Java infrastructures.

With the Enterprise Web 2.0 releases, ActiveGrid further extends the dynamic caching, LDAP integration and load-balancing capabilities of the ActiveGrid Studio and ActiveGrid Server products. ActiveGrid Studio 2.0 also boasts sophisticated new user interface and design capabilities for enterprise Web 2.0 developers, including:

ActiveGrid Enterprise Web 2.0 customers today are developing new dashboards that integrate multiple data sources on the front-end; "mashing-up" mission critical enterprise applications like CRM and ERP; and building new types of CSR applications that integrate multiple HR services.

ActiveGrid Studio 2.0 also features an improved look and feel, with a broad range of additional choices in new skins, colors, menus and wizards.

ActiveGrid Studio and ActiveGrid Server, Open Source Edition are available under the Apache Software License 2.0. ActiveGrid Server, Commercial Edition is available on a subscription basis for $8,000 to $12,000 per server per year, depending on volume. To download the open source or evaluation version of the software, go to http://www.activegrid.com/try.