12 Good Points About the LAMP Components

12 Good Points About the LAMP Components

Other than the fact that there is no dearth of developers who learn enough LAMP to competently put together a Web application, herewith an even dozen of enduring advantages to the LAMP solution stack:

1. Installation is easy because most Linux distro’s bundle all the other LAMP components.

2. Linux is flexible – A good developer takes advantage of access to the source code to customize the OS and optimize it as a base for Web applications.

3. Linux is versatile – The OS is “friendly” with a good range of file servers and network drivers.

4. Linux doesn’t mind legacy hardware -- because the open-source community has adapted it to work from mainframes to servers and desktops. Your ancient Burroughs mini or Sun workstation is no longer supported OEM-wise? Linux and the rest of the LAMP bundle will likely work happily in those.

5. The original Apache project was HTTPD, meaning it was a capable Web-facing platform right from the start. This is especially true for fairly uncomplicated file-based serving.

6. The standard Apache pack has extension modules that can be loaded to service important tasks like specialized authentication and security environments, data caching and support for basic site traffic analysis.

7. Apache speeds up the P languages (Perl, Python, or PHP) by accepting embedded interpreters and therefore substantially boosting Web application performance.

8. Unlike Linux, Apache is fairly easy to install and configure.

9. Once installed, Apache is so stable it needs little “care and feeding.”

10. In turn, MySQL is a highly functional relational database even in its default install configuration.

11. Backstopping relational tables and SQL as it does, MySQL does very well with Web applications that do not require frequent updates but must respond to a lot of queries. Now, doesn’t that sound exactly like a Web store for a small business with a limited product range?

12. This means MySQL is also a worthwhile candidate for blogs and knowledge bases or other types of reference sites.

In my next post, we’ll review more advantages of the LAMP building blocks and why the whole solution stack makes a lot of sense in the Web applications space.