php vs .net
Ventura IT develops web applications in html, php/mysql on the LAMP platform, .net, visual basic, c++, java, python, perl, cold fusion, ruby on rails, flash, actionscript, javascript, and ajax.
Out of all of these choices Ventura IT does most of it’s web development in php/mysql on the LAMP platform. This means we use php for the programming language, mysql as the database server, and the linux/apache/mysql/php stack or platform which, in a nutshell, means that we use a unix server to host our applications. In fact we use FreeBSD which is the most secure and fastest operating system for servers in the world.
The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of software, usually free and open source software, used to run dynamic Web sites or servers. The original expansion is as follows:
* Linux, referring to the operating system;
* Apache, the Web server;
* MySQL, the database management system (or database server);
* PHP or others, i.e. Perl, Python, the programming languages.
The combination of these technologies is used primarily to define a web server infrastructure, define a programming paradigm of developing software, and establish a software distribution package.
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). When used in combination they represent a solution stack of technologies that support application servers.
PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers. The most recent major release of PHP was version 5.2.6 on May 1, 2008.
MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) which has more than 11 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to simply as Apache, is a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently known as Sun Java System Web Server), and has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance.
Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the World Wide Web. As of June 2008 Apache served 49.12% of all websites.
FreeBSD is a Unix-like free operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through the 386BSD and 4.4BSD operating systems. It runs on Intel x86 family (IA-32) IBM PC compatible computers, DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC, IA-64, AMD64, PowerPC, ARM and NEC PC-9801 architectures along with Microsoft’s Xbox. Support for other architectures is in varying stages of development.
FreeBSD has been characterized as “the unknown giant among free operating systems.” It is not a clone of UNIX, but works like UNIX, with UNIX-compliant internals and system APIs. FreeBSD is generally regarded as reliable and robust. Among all operating systems which can accurately report uptime remotely, FreeBSD is the free operating system listed most often in Netcraft’s list of the 50 web servers with the longest uptime. A long uptime also indicates no crashes have occurred and no kernel updates have been deemed needed, since installing a new kernel requires a reboot, resetting the uptime counter of the system.
FreeBSD is developed as a complete operating system. The kernel, device drivers and all of the userland utilities, such as the shell, are held in the same source code revision tracking tree, whereas with Linux distributions, the kernel, userland utilities and applications are developed separately, then packaged together in various ways by others.
Who else uses the LAMP platform and FreeBSD?
“You might have noticed that the user-facing portion of Facebook is written in PHP, and we’re fortunate enough to be able to make contributions back to some PHP related projects. Most of our contributions (so far) have been towards an optimization extension called the Alternative PHP Cache (APC). Some of this code includes faster locking mechanisms like Futex locks, POSIX mutex locks, and porting spin locks from the PostgreSQL project. Some changes are bug fixes rather than enhancements, like bug #7816 and #8663 (a configuration and file update bug which never really affected Facebook directly, but we’re happy to help).”
“The PHP programming language has solidified itself as the language of choice for many top internet properties, including Facebook. PHP is easy to use and integrates well with Apache, Memcache, and MySQL.”
“Google has many tens of thousands of FreeBSD-based devices helping to run its production networks (Juniper, Force10, NetApp, etc..), MacOS X laptops, and the occasional FreeBSD network monitoring or test server. Research in FreeBSD security, networking, and other areas has also regularly been adopted recently and throughout its 30 year history to other open source systems.”
Yahoo
“Yahoo Inc. runs the ultimate index of the Internet, serving scads of daily net surfers with information about the World Wide Web. Yahoo, as well as the companies that advertise on Yahoo, rely on FreeBSD to run reliable and responsive web servers.”
“Netcraft is the leading researcher of web server software usage on the Internet. They use FreeBSD and Apache to power their website, and FreeBSD/Perl for all their Internet data collection.”
“FreeBSD … provides what is probably the most robust and capable TCP/IP stack in existence …”
— Michael O’Brien, SunExpert August 1996 volume 7 number 8.”
Microsoft
“Microsoft Hosts Project to Run PHP on .Net … The software giant’s push to better support dynamic languages continues with Phalanger, a project to deliver a PHP compiler on .Net.
— Darryl K. Taft, eweek.com”
Contact Ventura IT with your web development project!