Chapter 14. LAMP

In today's world where practically everything revolves around the Internet, making your Linux applications network-accessible is almost a necessity. Fortunately, there is plenty of help available in the open source community. The Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) combination of software provides the elements for a complete web application environment. While not a single package per se, this combination of open source packages is easy to assemble and gets you going in the Web world.

This chapter aims to provide an existing programmer with a kick-start in web application development using the open source LAMP platform. It covers the basics of the LAMP environment, showing how to incorporate an Apache web server, MySQL database server, and PHP programming language together on a Linux server. After that, a complete web application is shown, demonstrating the ease of using the LAMP environment to implement web applications.

What Is LAMP?

Unknown to many, some of the largest brand-name websites run on open source software. Sites such as Google, BBC, Yahoo!, Slashdot, and Wikipedia are all built on components that anyone can obtain for free and modify for their own use. According to the regular Netcraft survey (http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html) around 70% of all web domains are hosted on LAMP platforms.

LAMP is an all-encompassing label for web applications built around open source technologies (and sometimes proprietary ones). A LAMP application is traditionally ...

Get Professional Linux® Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.