OSSAtlanta.org

Seated to my left at a meeting I was attending the other day was a very sharp web developer. He teaches continuing education courses at a major university here in town. His day job is working for a local custom web development group. The've been fairly successful since the mid 1990s, with over half-dozen full-time employees. But things weren't going well for their group. They're all but shutting down,

cutting back to the original partners. What went wrong? He didn't understand. They weRead More...

A long time ago, a young man named Larry Wall wanted to be a translator for Wycliffe Bible translators. Somehow he ended up at NASA's Jet Propulsion Labratory (JPL) as a programmer. In the course of his duties, he needed a report-generator language. At the time, the de facto standard in the UNIX toolkit was AWK. AWK had some limitations, so Larry set out to write his own Practical Extraction and Reporting Language: PERL. Version 1 was released in 1987. It was fairly useful even then. I remembRead More...

We've looked at WordPress, Drupal and Joomla in previous articles. All three are written in PHP and all three use the MySQL database. In the open-source web services world the application stack of choice is the LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (or Perl or Python). Lots of open-source projects and lots of commercial sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia and Digg run on MySQL. MySQL is the leading open-source database in the world. It was started by three Swedes in 1995 who also starRead More...