4. What are some alternatives (proprietary or open source) to LAMP?

Chisnall (2006) wrote a great article outlining alternatives to each software package within the LAMP platform. Some of the technical justifications for his choices were a bit too heady for me, but I will provide a summary of his suggestions here.

Linux Alternatives

• OpenBSD^* – touted by Chisnall (2006) as an operating system (OS) “for the truly paranoid.” Each bug identified in the system is treated as potentially exploitable. Therefore, they attempt to remove every single occurrence of that kind of bug. It also has good firewall and routing capabilities, but it does not scale very well. This is because the symmetric multi-processing (SMP) architecture is not very well developed. Thus, load-balancing across processors is not as efficient.

• NetBSD – “Well known for running on everything, including your toaster (Chisnall, 2006, § Alternatives to Linux). It has a very clean system architecture, which makes it portable and easy for systems administrators to support.

Apache Alternatives

• LightTPD – Chisnall (2006) says that this software is great for providing “static content from a single processor machine” (§ Alternatives to Apache). However, it does not scale as well as other web server applications, such as YAWS (which stands for Yet Another Web Server).

MySQL Alternatives

• PostgreSQL – Chisnall (2006) suggests that PostgreSQL performs better than MySQL. The website for PostgreSQL (2008 ) defines it as an enterprise-class relational database system. It is feature-rich and has a reputation for reliability and data integrity.

PHP Alternatives

• Ruby on Rails – Chisnall (2006) does not explain what this is, except to say that is “for database-driven applications” (§ Alternatives to PHP). Looking at the product website, I liked the tag line “Web development that doesn’t hurt” (Ruby on Rails, n.d.). It goes on to explain that RoR is a website development application based on the programming language Ruby. It uses the agile software development methodology, which radically speeds up the timeline for development; projects that used to take weeks can be completed in a matter of days (Ruby on Rails, n.d.).

*BSD = Berkeley Software Distribution

References

Chisnall, D. (2006, June 2). Alternatives to LAMP. InformIT. Retrieved July 16, 2008 from

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=472693

PostgreSQL (2008). PostgreSQL: About. Retrieved July 27, 2008 from http://www.postgresql.org/about/

Ruby on Rails (n.d.) Retrieved on July 27, 2008 from http://www.rubyonrails.com/