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What is the LAMP software platform?
LAMP is used as an acronym to describe a popular web site infrastructure platform:
Linux
Apache
MySql
Php or Perl or Python
This is a very common and powerful open source software stack that drives many popular dynamic web sites today.
To break down the various components:
Linux is the operating system that acts as the basis for the "stack". Linux is known as a Unix-Like operating
system that was created and is supported by the open source community.
Apache is the web server software that responds to requests from web browsers (commonly listens to port 80). Since
April of 1996 Apache has been the most popular web server on the Internet and in a March 2007 study, Apache
was known to be serving 58% of all Internet sites.
MySql is the database engine that hosts the databases to provide dynamic content or lookup up tables for example
a zip code database to provide the city, location or population information related to the zip code. First
released in May of 1995, MySql in known to have over 10 million installations. Some very popular web sites
that are driven by MySql are YouTube, flickr, CNET and Wikipedia.
PHP is the programming language that a web developer uses to generate the dynamic content by talking to the
database and pushing the content back to the web browser, via Apache. PHP is powered by the Zend Engine.
Sometimes Perl or Python is used as an alternate language for this layer of the platform.
This package of software combines to provide a very robust web server that can be programmed to support the
needs of nearly any interactive web site. All of the components of this software platform are commonly packaged
with most distributions of Linux.
Some of the advantages of using the LAMP platform as a web server is that it is free, it will run on "ordinary" PC hardware platforms
with much lower overhead than most Microsoft solutions, most of the components were originally designed with
web site development as the focus, it is very widely support in the open source community, and it is considered
to be high performance and very stable.
Author: FixingStuff
Article Date: 06-07-2007 |
