Technology
Our chosen development architecture is the so-called LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). This uses open source components for the server operating system (Linux), the web server (Apache), the database (MySQL) and the web server scripting language (PHP). We've chosen this architecture for the following reasons:
- Widely supported by internet hosts
- Low total cost of ownership, as there are no licence costs to pay for the server platform, unlike with proprietary technologies
- Scalable architecture - the latest versions of PHP and MySQL are now very powerful, and support large sites such as Wikipedia and Facebook
- Portability - PHP and MySQL run just as happily on a Windows laptop as on a high end Linux server, and can run very lightly without significantly affecting the performance of the machine
- Low risk - as an open source platform, we do not run the risk that a commercial vendor will decide not to support the LAMP platform any more, as (especially with such a broad user base), there will always be a community of developers using and updating it.