LAMP

Overview

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. While PHP is probably the most popular, the 'P' in LAMP has been known to stand for Perl and Python as well. Simply put, LAMP is a stack of technologies that come together to provide the de-facto standard web-application platform. LAMPs ubiquity is due largely to all the components being freely available to download and use.

Typical Applications

The LAMP stack is capable of pretty much anything; Blogs, Wikis, Online shops, news sites, SNS sites, etc. However, as with all systems there are limitations. While one look at facebook will tell you that a LAMP based web application can achieve massive popularity and scale well, there is a lot of design that has to go into building that application in the correct way. This is also statistically pretty rare. When choosing technology it is important to play to the strengths of each component. Where as ASP.NET and JEE solutions usually scale out of the box well there is an overhead and a cost involved. Aside from scalability, other possible areas for concern with a LAMP project are security and processing.
LAMP is typically not an enterprise solution however that is not to say that it is not capable of being used as one.

Components

Linux: Linux is a ultra stable unix based operating system which comes in a variety of flavors such as Ubuntu, Redhat, Suse and Debian, to name but a few.
Apache: Apache is an application server developed by the Apache Software Foundation. Essentially Apache provides web content using the HTTP protocol to requests from browsers.
MySQL: MySQL is a fully featured relational database.

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