Running Linux, 5th Edition

Chapter 25. Running Web Applications with MySQL and PHP

Just writing a couple of lines of HTML code is not enough for most web sites; dynamic content is what people want today. To tell the truth, most commercial web sites offer more dynamic content than visitors really want—Flash-driven animations that greet you instead of useful information, for instance, or interactive JavaScript menus that make information harder to retrieve instead of easier—but in this chapter we give you an introduction to offering basic dynamic content that's really useful.

Linux is—you guessed it—an excellent platform for serving dynamic content. A bazillion web sites serving dynamic content are already running on Linux today; this is one of the foremost application areas where Linux excels.

Dynamic content can be achieved by two entirely different ways of programming: server-side programming and client-side programming. JavaScript, Java applets, and the Microsoft-specific ActiveX platform are the most common ways of producing interactive HTML pages with client-side programming.

Because of limitations in these technologies, however, most sites with substantial information to deliver use server-side programs. You can use them in many different flavors with many different software packages, but one combination has become ubiquitous for implementing these techniques. This combination is so common nowadays that it even has received a phony acronym: LAMP, which is short for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. We have already ...