Solution Stack 101: The Continuing Attraction to LAMP

Solution Stack 101: The Continuing Attraction to LAMP

In our last post, we identified the starting line-up for LAMP, argued that an open source stack inherently reduces investment risk for a start-up and well, the obvious benefit that all the components are dirt-cheap to acquire. Today, let’s delve into variations and why you still save money whatever you do.

A decade has passed since a German developer first espoused LAMP in print. Since then, our ever-adventurous brethren in the open-source community have espoused different flavors. The eager young developers at HyTech Professionals (www.hytechpro.com) up in Nashua (NH) have succeeded with dozen of contract projects alternately writing the user interface in Perl, Python or PHP. So it’s still LAMP anyway. But they are really, really passionate about the elegance of Ruby on Rails. Now, rather than get hung up with an acronym like LAMR (just how courageously can you stand on a “lamer” approach and still expect to get paid megabucks?), a wise man settled the issue by ruling that P should mean “programming language”. So that covers PHP, Perl, Python, and Ruby really neatly.

Other folks swear by PostgreSQL and rely on mod python or mod perl to do the front end. Happily, we still have a genie’s LAMP with the last two functions switched. In a proprietary environment, Windows instead of Linux and IIS in place of Apache does not make for a nice acronym at all.

Seriously, the great advantage of LAMP and every other open-source stack is that all the components are readily available, bundled with any Linux distro you care to name. Hence, there is no lack of developers who get trained on open-source OS, scripting languages and Web servers. This is a great benefit for small and medium businesses that would like to launch their first Web application or expand what they have to make enterprise collaboration and Internet marketing a reality.