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The acronym LAMP (or L.A.M.P.) refers to a set of free software programs commonly used together to run dynamic Web sites or servers:

The acronym has three major uses:

  1. Define a web server infrastructure
  2. Define a programming paradigm of developing software
  3. Define a software distribution package

To be precise, it is an open source Web platform.

Though the originators of these open source programs did not design them all to work specifically with each other, the combination has become popular because of its low acquisition cost and because of the ubiquity of its components (which come bundled with most current Linux distributions particularly as deployed by ISPs). When used in combination they represent a solution stack of technologies that support application servers. Other such stacks include unified application development environments such as Apple Computer's WebObjects, Java/Java EE, Grails, and Microsoft's .NET architecture.

The scripting component of the LAMP stack has its origins in the CGI web interfaces that became popular in the early 1990s. This technology allows the user of a web browser to execute a program on the web server, and to thereby receive dynamic as well as static content. Programmers used scripting languages with these programs because of their ability to manipulate text streams easily and efficiently, even when they originate from disparate sources. For this reason system designers often referred to such scripting systems as glue languages.

Michael Kunze coined the acronym LAMP in an article for the German computing magazine c't in 1998 (12/98, page 230). The article aimed to show that a bundle of free software could provide a viable alternative to commercial packages. Knowing about the IT-world's love of acronyms, Kunze came up with LAMP as a marketing-like term to popularize the use of free software. O'Reilly and MySQL AB have popularized the term among English-speakers. Indeed, MySQL AB has since based some of its marketing efforts on the popularity of the LAMP stack.

Variants


Some developers prefer to use the M to mean mod perl or mod python and the P to mean PostgreSQL.

Other variants of the term include:

  • Instead of Linux:
  • Instead of MySQL:
    • FLAP, using Firebird.
    • LAIP, using Informix.
    • LAPP, using PostgreSQL.
    • BAPP, using BSD and PostgreSQL.
    • LAPS, using PostgreSQL servlets.
    • OPAL, using Oracle
  • Instead of Python/Perl/PHP:
    • GLAM, using Groovy.
    • LAMJ, using JSP servlets.
  • Others or Some Combination of the Above
    • AMPLE, with the E for Eclipse.
    • LAMPS, with the S for SSL.
    • "A Brighter LAMP", with the last two letters meaning Middleware and PostgreSQL; this allows selection of languages that do not start with the letter P such as Tcl and Ruby.
    • WIMP, for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft IIS, MySQL, and PHP.
    • WIMSA, for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft IIS, Microsoft SQL Server, and ASP.
    • MARS, for MySQL, Apache, Ruby, and Solaris *
    • FWIP, for Firebird, Windows, IIS, and PHP.
    • FWAP, for Firebird, Windows, Apache, and PHP.
    • WAPP, for Windows, Apache, PostgreSQL, and PHP.

Some employ the term LAMP generically to describe such alternative systems rather than make a new acronym, using it to denote the contrast between such systems and a unified web application development environment.

As an example, Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, runs software in what one could characterize as a LAMP environment. Wikipedia uses MediaWiki software, developed primarily under Linux, with content served with Apache HTTPD server, content stored in a MySQL database, and program logic implemented in PHP.

See also


External links


Free software culture and documents | Linux software | Perl | Software development | Web development software

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "LAMP (software bundle)".

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