Tedium - I Love LAMP 💡

Today in Tedium: A huge portion of the internet is brought to you by open-source software, and a good chunk of that open-source software doesn’t get its due outside of programming circles. Programmers are constantly looking for new ways to skin a cat, but too often, we don’t take a step back to consider how democratizing the code itself was—how it made once-difficult tasks approachable by mere mortals. One of those programming languages is something that is used by nearly 80 percent of sites on the internet, and a huge chunk of the people using that programming language on their server are using three key tools—the operating system Linux, the HTTP server Apache, and the database system MySQL. Together these tools combined with PHP into one of the greatest killer apps the open-source community ever produced: the LAMP stack. (Get it?) Today’s Tedium shines a light on LAMP, the background tools that, together, turned the internet into a machine that anyone could run. — Ernie @ Tedium

An O’Reilly book on PHP and MySQL. The well-known tech publishing firm is responsible for popularizing the LAMP stack, which refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP in its best-known form.

Why LAMP was (and is) so fundamental to the modern internet

In a lot of ways, the LAMP stack was an idea already in practice that just needed a little bit of branding goodness. It was an idea that needed a little push—and that push was enough to outdo competing commercial products from players as large as Microsoft and Apple.

But despite only getting a fairly modest push compared to the sheer scale of the major companies it competed against, LAMP stack still rules the roost.

The terminology dates to around 2000 or 2001, with David Axmark and Monty Widenius, two of the cofounders of the relational database MySQL, credited for making the initial connection between the various parts into a combined service that could be sold to developers as an open-source framework. After the developers met with staffers at the publishing firm O’Reilly Media, the firm—which specializes in technical learning manuals that target programmers and IT departments—had embraced the term, evangelizing what it meant to the broader digital community.

This was a smart move on the part of Axmark and Widenius: O’Reilly Media is considered widely responsible for popularizing some of the most important terms in digital technology—including “open source,” “Web 2.0,” and the “Maker movement.”

In a 2001 article for the company’s ONLamp.com website, O’Reilly cofounder Dale Dougherty admitted that a similar kind of branding work was at play with LAMP.

At the O’Reilly Network, our editors have been discussing how to unify and focus our open source coverage. As you know, open source covers a lot of ground, and it can be hard to identify those common areas where developers converge. Too often, the market identifies open source with Linux, and Linux is already well covered on many sites. We have felt that the market has ignored the tools that make Linux a great applications development platform, especially for robust web applications that run on Linux servers.

The lightbulb that went off in my head was that LAMP represents the open source web platform. Most importantly, LAMP is the platform of choice for the development and deployment of high performance web applications. It is solid and reliable, and if Apache is any indicator, then LAMP sites predominate. If you visit the Netcraft survey and look up popular sites, you’ll notice that many run Apache on Linux, and have either mod_perl or mod_php installed. (Netcraft is unable, using its methodology, to detect sites that use MySQL, but we feel comfortable, knowing the number of MySQL downloads, that this open source database is making significant inroads on proprietary databases, especially for web applications.)

Dougherty noted that, when thinking about it in these terms, it was clear that O’Reilly was already using LAMP for its own content management platforms and tools.

PHP, basically by accident, became one of the world’s most popular programming languages. (Shahadat Shemul/Unsplash)

In fact, the only thing that O’Reilly really didn’t sell about the LAMP concept in the end was the idea that the programming languages Python and Perl would be languages generally referred to when using the term, along with PHP. At the time LAMP came to life, see, PHP was on a major upswing—and that growth would only continue to strengthen over time, with many of the most popular applications produced in the mid-2000s reliant on the language.

For years, LAMP stacks had natural advantages for end users, as their ubiquity allowed for the rise of web hosts that could offer cheap processing and storage for PHP-based services, meaning you could have a working interactive website for maybe $5 a month or less, depending on the size of the app and its use case.

That was democratizing—and allowed bedroom experimenters and large corporations alike to try new things online, outside of a walled garden. For the average consumer, the types of tools that won out allowed them to create polished presences for their businesses or creative work with a relatively limited amount of fuss.

It was a compelling pitch, and it remains the prevailing one on the modern internet. If you heard developers, though, you’d be surprised to learn the most popular kind of development environment generally has a bad reputation.

There are a lot of reasons for that.

The LAMP stack is everywhere—but nobody seems to love it anymore

The interesting thing about LAMP is that, pretty much the entire time it’s been in popular use, developers have been trying to move away from it for various reasons.

With the exception of Linux, whose flexibility and open nature has proven the fundamental glue for modern development, each of the LAMP tools have issues significant enough that developers have been trying to find ways around them for years.

PHP, for example, has traditionally been seen as a language with a low barrier of entry that can easily be misused in the wrong hands and has serious syntax flaws, meaning that there’s a lot of low-quality PHP code out there. Apache, meanwhile, has long had a reputation of being fairly heavy and aggressive with memory use, which is not a thing that people want out of their servers, and has led to the uptake of competitors like Nginx. (There is a well-known LAMP alternative called LEMP, which replaces Apache with Nginx.)

And then there’s MySQL, which has maintained many of its technical advantages over time even as competitors have appeared, but has an imperfect reputation within the open source community due to the fact that it’s generally distributed as free software, but not fully open source—requiring those who would like to work on the code to sign a contributor agreement before they can work on it—despite the fact it was originally sold that way. (These days, it’s owned by Oracle, which has had a complicated historical relationship with open source, as seen in the form of its long-running lawsuit against Google over Android.) This situation actually led to the creation of a widely used fork of MySQL called MariaDB, which was created by Monty Widenius in direct response to the Oracle purchase.

For one reason or another, alternate approaches to development have slowly become key to the way we develop things online. There is a pretty strong case that, for example, if Mark Zuckerberg had developed Facebook in 2005 or 2006, he might have gone with a different programming approach, as by that time, formidable alternatives to PHP had emerged, including Ruby on Rails. A few years after that, and Facebook might have been fully JavaScript-based.

But because PHP is used by such utterly massive companies, it’s led the legacy language and environment to constantly improve.

Modern developers often don’t have a great opinion of LAMP stacks, despite the fact that servers that rely on it are just about everywhere, and buying access to one is trivial. For all the technical advantages that come with spinning up a site using the server-side JavaScript runtime environment Node.js, you can often get a PHP-based site online without ever having to dip into a command-line interface or knowing what Git is—which eliminates a pretty significant barrier of entry, even though there are a lot of advantages to gaining fluency with the command line or using Github. Heck, many PHP-based CMS platforms don’t even require you to know much more than HTML and CSS to customize things.

Development paradigms are constantly evolving and changing, and if you’re a full-time developer, keeping those skills up to date is important. But many people aren‘t, and these shifting paradigms, while generally good for the modern web, leave amateurs who just want to create something useful behind. The LAMP stack, for all its modern-day weaknesses, lowered the bar to entry in a way that modern technology stacks often have not.

Fortunately, folks are working on this specific problem—see the great work being done at Glitch, for example. But even if the broader technical community looks at LAMP as something of a relic, it nonetheless serves an important role.

LAMP is the fluorescent lightbulb of the internet. It’s utilitarian and does its job well, even if it doesn’t have the glow of an incandescent light nor the novelty of an LED bulb. It’s there when you need it.