Comment Articles

Signals from the open-source LAMP

Tags:
Lamp,
MySQL,
Zend,
PHP

Peter Judge ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 12 Sep 2002 14:54 BST

Around the end of 2000, the open-source movement gained something new to rally round. People noticed that as well as Linux, Apache was doing very well as a Web server, and the open-source database, MySQL, was gaining features at a ferocious rate, making it -- in many circumstances -- quite viable as an alternative to products like Oracle.

With the addition of a scripting language, the open sourcers said, they had a viable open-source Web platform to deploy quite sophisticated applications. The scripting language field was not quite so clear at this point, but since three of the leaders (Perl Python and PHP) all began with the same letter, the group had the basis for a nifty acronym. LAMP, for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl/Python, was to be the open-source Web platform.

As an acronym it's got a lot going for it. For a start, it's more business-like than the rather lightweight-sounding Floss (for Free/Libre/OpenSource Software). It details a set of specific tools that should make up a workable alternative to the (more) commercial industry's products. And in one word answers the problems that follow from the industry's overemphasis on Linux.

Linux is an operating system, and if we give the idea that the open-source movement is just based around that, then people can dismiss it by saying they need more -- they need applications. LAMP points out that all the essential components are there, in open-source form, to do real work on real Web sites.

Much of the energy (if that's not a bad pun) came from publisher O'Reilly, which noticed that it is, itself, a LAMP user. "I realised that we used LAMP at O'Reilly Network," said Dale Dougherty director of O'Reilly Research, when the company launched OnLamp.com, a Web site for open-source information and advocacy.

One might describe LAMP as a standard for the group to rally around, if the standard lamp was not such a domesticated piece of hardware.

Since then, the acronym has clarified a little. While Perl and Python have strong communities, in most popular usage of scripting languages PHP seems to have taken the lead -- and the last letter of the word.