ActiveGrid, which calls itself the "Enterprise Web 2.0 company," is moving its tooling over to the Eclipse open source environment and will join the Eclipse Foundation as well.

All of the company's tooling will support Eclipse by the end of the year, said Peter Yared, ActiveGrid founder and CEO, during an interview at the LinuxWorld conference on Wednesday. The company also will join Eclipse later this year.

ActiveGrid has focused on development of applications on the LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python,PHP) stack and on grid computing. The company says it adds enterprise-ready tooling, SOA, and security features to the stack.

IBM's backing of PHP helped sway ActiveGrid into the Eclipse camp, Yared said.

"Well, when we started ActiveGrid and LAMP, Eclipse didn't support scripting languages. But now after IBM's support of PHP, [Eclipse is] supporting scripting languages really well," Yared said. "So now, Eclipse has become LAMP-friendly if you will, so we're going to jump ahead of that parade, right? We don't like doing code editors and things like that."

Yared explained the company's linking of Web 2.0 and grid computing.

"The big thing about Web 2.0 is its ability to scale on large clusters of commodity machines and that's the grid aspect of this technology. So now you can build rich apps but scale them horizontally," Yared said.

The company has not yet determined which level of Eclipse membership it will seek. Chief membership levels include Strategic Members, which view Eclipse as strategic; Add-in Provider members, which view Eclipse as an important part of their strategy, and Associate Members, which is for non-profit organizations, standards bodies, universities and other similar members participating in development of the Eclipse ecosystem.