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Open Source Development Platforms:

LAMP is a free, open source software bundle or "stack" which allows users to operate Web servers and develop dynamic, database-driven websites.

Fast Facts:

Acronym was first coined in 1998 by Michael Kunze in an article for a German magazine
Name stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP
Linux stands for the *nix variants, which are distributed under different names/brands. Famous brands are: Red hat linux, Ubuntu, Open Suse, Fedora, Debian.
Perl and Python have recently been recognized as possible alternatives for PHP in LAMP

Analyzing your requirements thoroughly to understand your business needs.
Performing extensive research to identify optimal open source technologies.
Identifying areas that need customization, and preparing a plan to integrate open source software technologies.
Subjecting the software to thorough quality assurance testing to identify any inherent software defects, once the customization and integration process is completed.
Creating detailed customer-oriented documentation to help the you use the software effectively.
Providing technical support and maintenance for the software

LAMP

With LAMP, you only pay for the development of features you need, when you need them, and you also get many additional features for free. This provides you with the best results to high level eCommerce websites, all without having to worry about costly software licensing fee.

Today, LAMP has proven to be a solid platform for developing critical Internet web business applications. As evidence of the stability that the LAMP architecture provides, major companies such as The Associated Press, Google, NASA, Suzuki, CitySearch, Conseco and many others have migrated toward Open Source Technology solutions.

LAMP is a bundle of software programs that provide a platform for developing and implementing web based applications. The acronym LAMP refers to a solution stack of open-source software that is primarily used to run dynamic websites.

LAMP Components
The LAMP stack consists of Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and any of Perl, Python or PHP, the three most popular scripting languages for developing web applications. The amalgamation of these technologies is primarily used to define a programming paradigm for developing software and web-server infrastructure.

Linux: This is an open source operating system that is based on UNIX and runs on a wide variety of hardware. This operating system can be configured and optimised for individual requirements.

Apache: Commonly known as Apache HTTP Server,it is a web server that can be used to serve both static as well as dynamic web pages. Apache is available for a variety of operating systems like: Microsoft Windows, Novell Netware and Unix. It provides different modules to add functionality to the basic server.

Apache also provides a host of features that assist in application development such as: GUI based server configuration interfaces, URL rewriter enabling the creation of search engine friendly URLs and running of multiple websites from a singe Apache installation etc.

MySQL: It is one of the most popular open source relational database management systems that make the best use of SQL to process data in a database. It offers excellent quick-start capability with the average time from software download to installation completion being less than fifteen minutes.

In addition to this it also provides great mechanisms ensuring that only authorized users have entry to the database server. Some of its features that make this database management system the most dominant transactional database engines on the market are: unlimited row-level locking, distributed transaction capability, and multi-version transaction support.

PHP: It is an open source server side scripting language that can be used to develop a whole range of dynamic web applications. It is based on an Object Oriented Architecture and most of its features, concepts and syntax are based on the C and Perl programming languages.

Widely used as scripting language, it generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as an output. It also provides a command line interface SAPI for developing shell and desktop applications, log parsing, or any other system administration tasks

Python: Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with extensive standard libraries, and can be learned in a few days. Many Python programmers report substantial productivity gains and feel the language encourages the development of higher quality, more maintainable code.

Perl: Perl is a general-purpose programming language originally developed for text manipulation and now used for a wide range of tasks including system administration, web development, network programming, GUI development, and more.

The language is intended to be practical (easy to use, efficient, complete) rather than beautiful (tiny, elegant, minimal). Its major features are that it's easy to use, supports both procedural and object-oriented (OO) programming, has powerful built-in support for text processing, and has one of the world's most impressive collections of third-party modules.

Perl borrows features from other programming languages including C, shell scripting (sh), AWK, sed and Lisp.
The language provides powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data length limits of many contemporary Unix tools,
making it the ideal language for manipulating text files. It is also used for graphics programming, system administration, network programming, applications that require database access and CGI programming on the Web. Perl is nicknamed "the Swiss Army chainsaw of programming languages" due to its flexibility and adaptability