Anyone can cook

I just watched Ratatouille (again) at my niece's house this past weekend... the theme is "Anyone can cook". (Meaning "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.") With that in mind...

Anyone can be a web-developer!
Thanks to free and open source web-development tools, anyone can become a web-developer. I will mention a few of those free tools...

1) Apache Web Server
Tool 1: The Apache web server--actually called httpd (meaning the "HTTP Daemon" (a daemon is a background service)) but is often called "Apache" because it is supported by the Apache Software Foundation.

According to Netcraft, Apache has been the most popular web server since 2006 and currently (as of March 2010) serves over 54% of all websites. It serves 67% of the million busiest sites (the next is Microsoft's IIS at 17.4%). And it's free!

You can find it here: httpd.apache.org.

2) PHP: Hypertext Processor
Tool 2: The PHP scripting language. it currently stands for "PHP: Hypertext Processor". (It used to stand for "Personal Home Page", but the authors thought a recursive acronym was cooler.) By embedding PHP instructions into your HTML web-pages, you can create dynamic websites.

It's hard to tell how "popular" a programming language is, but PHP is pretty popular these days (it currently ranks 3rd on the TIOBE index of all languages).

Find it here: www.php.net

3) MySQL Database Engine
Tool 3: The MySQL database engine (pronounced "my es-queue-el", as opposed to SQL, which is pronounced "sequel"). SQL is a standardized, mathematically-grounded language for managing and querying relational databases. MySQL is an open-source SQL database engine.

Whereas some SQL databases have been around for years (e.g. Oracle started in 1979), MySQL is relatively new (1995) and only really worth talking about as of MySQL 5 (2005), with the addition of the InnoDB storage engine. But it installs on practically everything and has a number of useful (and free) tools. And it's free! (Note: I can't find any usage notes, but MySQL claims that it's the most popular open source database.)

Find MySQL here: www.mysql.com

XAMPP, LAMP, WAMP, MAMP, etc.
So... with Apache, PHP, and MySQL, anyone can develop websites (YMMV). But how long does it take to download, install, configure, and test everything--especially if you're new at this? Because these tools play so nicely together some of the open source community decided to package them together--just to make your life easier. (Although getting something working yourself can be more instructive.)

• LAMP stands for "Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP" (packages depend on your OS)
• WAMP stands for "Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP"
• MAMP stands for "Mac, Apache, MySQL, and PHP"
• XAMPP stands for "Any OS, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl"
• etc. (Wikipedia has a better list of "*AMP" packages here)

Using WAMP to build web-sites on my Windows laptop and upload them to my Linux web-server (running LAMP) means I can choose the cheapest hosting plan (windows vs. linux, etc) and still get the job done. And it's all free!


In my experience: WAMP is fine for Windows machines--it has an installer for configuring MySQL and Apache services; everything is based inside a single folder to keep things clean. XAMPP, however, can be run from a thumb-drive, if need be (see PortableApps.com). In fact, I've been able to run Trac off a thumb-drive (Apache, MySQL, Python, and Subversion) via XAMPP!