Choosing a LAMP Environment

David McGraw, Oyova Software
Jacksonville, Florida

When our clients ask us to build something for them, they have an outcome in mind: a problem to solve in their office, an effect to achieve on their website, a mobile app that they can imagine even though it doesn’t yet exist.

They rarely want to hang out and discuss .NET vs. PHP.

So it’s up to us to determine what the best development environment for their project will be. Most of the time, we choose a LAMP environment. LAMP is an acronym formed from the first initials of a group of popular open-source software: operating system Linux, http web server Apache, database MySQL, and scripting language PHP. While they weren’t designed specifically to be used together, the quartet has come to be known as LAMP.

The first advantage is cost. Not only does the use of open-source software reduce costs in terms of software investment, it also means we don’t have to deal with licensing, special hosting needs, or pricey hardware requirements. We can give our clients a lot more bang for their buck.

Lower cost isn’t much to offer if the quality is poor, but that’s not the case with the LAMP environment. The development community is huge, so you’ve got new ideas popping up every day, along with impressive support and documentation. The solutions are also standards-compliant.

“It’s very stable,” explains Daniel Rener, Lead Technology Consultant at Oyova. “It’s been out for a long time and a lot of people have been working on it, so it’s very mature.” Apache, in fact, the A in LAMP, is the most used web server in the world because of that stability and maturity it offers.

LAMP environments often run leaner, too, for a green advantage as well as further financial savings.  You can build your programs locally and then deploy them online, and you can handle more processes more efficiently than with, for example, a Windows server.  Daniel points out that you can set up a new LAMP server in minutes, a further example of its efficiency.

In the end, LAMP environments give us the ability to bring in solutions from a wide array of feature sets, combined to create a custom packaged solution. This is a highly cost effective way to create solutions for our customers which meet their needs and exceed their expectations.