WAMP, LAMP and other server stacks
Aug 21st, 2006 by Karen
Today, a colleague of mine passed along a good article from the July 10 issue of eWeek (here is a similar article from their website) about how different IT stacks perform. The article compared a number of different IT server setups (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP; Windows, Apache, MySQL, JSP and many more) to see how they performed. Sadly, the writers didn’t compare MAMP (Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or any version of Coldfusion. The interesting thing that the writers discovered is that WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) setups perform quite well as do Windows JBoss (Java) and Window Python setups. This is unexpected because many people see WAMP setups as the ugly duckling being accepted by Window fanatics or Open Source gurus. However, the testing proved that a WAMP setup can in some cases outperform a LAMP setup.
My own personal reaction was “who would have thunk it” and it only reinforces for me the necessity of being flexible in your skills and choices. When I originally came to UH the Libraries website ran on Windows, Apache, SQL Server, and Coldfusion. Over the last year we have migrated to Windows/Linux, Apache, SQL Server, Coldfusion. We also run some straight-up LAMP servers for our blogs and wikis. This has allowed us to leverage our existing expertise while developing new skills.
At Cortland I was on a similar path. In my last year there I investigated running MySQL and PHP on Windows servers even the library website was a Windows only endeavor (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, ASP). Ironically, one of the reasons I started working with Linux was because I wasn’t successful in trying to get PHP and MySQL to work the way I wanted on my Windows server. On reflection that may have been a result of the webserver (IIS) rather than the OS. Still my experience has been that when you use open source software on Windows servers you can be limited by what has been “packaged” in the Windows distribution. The same is true in Linux except for you always have the option of compiling from source (if you know how).
The bottom line is that WAMP setups may be a good choice for libraries to get their feet wet with open source software without having to overcome the huge learning curve of the command line that comes with LAMP servers.
Interesting - I’ll have to read the article. I’ve been into WAMP since I started messing with Wordpress and designing my own blog. It works great - it allows me to easily hack away at Wordpress themes in the safety of my own laptop, rather than live on the web.
I didn’t realize you could actually use WAMP to RUN something. Wow. Seriously - I thought it was more of a developer back-end thing. How funny.
That has been the conventional wisdom. However, this article show that the setup will take the load of a production environment was well. As I said one downside is that you need to make sure the packages you install have what you want. But if you are staying fairly mainstream in your needs that shouldn’t be a problem.
Another useful tool if you’re in WAMP-land but want a more unix-y environment to work in is cygwin. It brings nearly every favored GNU utility and many larger packages to windows and is fairly easy to maintain. It can be a joy to dive into an otherwise messy set of windows configuration files using grep, cut, awk, sort, sed, more, tail, etc., from bash or tcsh or whatever you might be used to. Easy to install, free-as-in-speech, and makes it even easier to take advantage of the benefits offered by FLOSS, or just to get a start on the unix learning curve while still living in the more comfortable (for many) win* environment.
Duh, eWeek is pro anything-that-promotes-Windows-as-the-platform-of-choice. Sorry, I don’t pay any attention to eWeek. I’m not that naive.
Use whatever works for you the best.
The AMP stack under Windows is a much simpler concept for the majority of Windows users, over telling them to install Linux.
Using Apache, PHP, MySQL under Windows does not mean loss of functionality of feature set. Its just about the same as under Linux. And the win32 ports are not hacks… The s/w was designed to be platform independent.
If you are looking for a Windows solution, take a look at the Web-Developer Server Suite.
I use PHP&mySQL under windows using wamp server(all in one- apach/php/mysql). I think it’s pretty simple to use, but if you use for online I still think you should use linux hosting as you will be sure it’s 100% compatible