Dynamic LAMP

The earnest brother-developers of mine at HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com) could only agree enthusiastically with the even dozen advantages of the LAMP solution stack I run in the last post. Clearly, cost savings is not even the major advantage of using the LAMP combo.

What happens, for example, when all you want to do is save time and cobble together a Web application using only Linux for the platform and Apache for the Web server? Sure, any developer will tell you it’s a static site. You have to build information pages and fill them in yourself. But never mind, the rudimentary e-commerce “solution” seems to work all right because you’ve gotten hold of a utility or two that lets customers put stuff in their shopping cart and execute orders. So everything is hunky-dory until your wonderful line of herbal-source food supplements expands with the fad of the month year after year. Pretty soon, adding product pages and processing orders becomes a managerial nightmare. And this site on the cheap does not even dynamically welcome back a customer and recognize her as a loyal buyer of slimming products.

If you needed any more convincing about the need for dynamic scripting (PHP, Perl or Python) and a robust MySQL database, take a gander at just two examples built on LAMP: WordPress and Wikipedia.

Both are highly scalable, accommodating an apparently infinite number of contributions and pulling the information from the database in whatever sequence the visitor wants. In the case of WordPress, PHP is the application environment, responsible for taking that data from the MySQL-run server and displaying it on the unvarying but hugely convenient blogging template. The relational power of MySQL is what enables WordPress to display prior posts, offer a list of categories or just posts for one category the viewer is interested in.

In my next post, we will cover some more benefits that LAMP brings, specifically for revenue-producing Web sites.