Developing Web Applications with Perl, memcached, MySQL® and Apache

Chapter 1. LAMMP, Now with an Extra M

How things have changed in the last decade! The Internet is no longer a luxury. It is now a necessity. Every day, more and more commerce is conducted over the Internet, more businesses are built around the Internet, and more people use the Internet for their primary source of entertainment, communication, and social networking. To provide all this functionality, more and more web applications and services are available and required. These applications and services are replacing traditional desktop applications and legacy ways of doing things; the local computer focus is now Internet-centric. Sun Microsystems' motto, "The network is the computer," truly has become a reality.

The way today's web sites are developed and how the underlying architecture is implemented have also changed. With Web 2.0, web applications are much more dynamic than ever and offer rich, desktop-like functionality. Web applications that once ran exclusively on servers and produced HTML output for web browser clients are now multitiered, distributed applications that have both client components like AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), JavaScript, and Flash, as well as server components like mod_perl, PHP, Rails, Java servlets, etc. These new web applications are much richer in features, and users now expect them to behave like desktop applications. The result is a satisfying and productive user experience.

The architecture that is required to support these applications ...