AMP Stack for Web Application Development and Deployment

Two AMP stacks (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) are available to developers on Solaris platforms: Web Stack and Cool Stack.

Web Stack Software

Web Stack software is a collection of popular open source web technologies that enable developers to easily build and deploy web applications. Web Stack includes an AMP (Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP) stack that has been optimized for the Solaris OS.

The OpenSolaris Web Stack project is associated with the Sun FreeWare (SFW) project. The Web Stack binaries are available for the OpenSolaris OS in the OpenSolaris package repository. See Installing the Web Development Stack for more information.

The Web Stack components include the following technologies:

• Apache – A HTTP web server, which serves web pages to web clients such as browsers.

• MySQL – A relational database engine (DBMS) that can be used to store most dynamic data for web applications.

• PHP – A scripting language, which is used to embed instructions within HTML pages to provide dynamic content. A NetBeans plugin for PHP can also be installed in the NetBeans IDE from the Tools >  Plugins >  Available Plugins menu.

• PostgreSQL – An object-relational database management system (ORDBMS). PostgreSQL uses a client/server model.

• Ruby on Rails – A framework for web application development. Ruby is the object-oriented programming language. Rails is an open source Ruby framework for developing web-based, database-driven applications. In Web Stack, Ruby includes extensions for OpenSSL, curses, Tcl/Tk, and readline. The NetBeans IDE includes support for Ruby and JRuby.

• Squid – A fully-featured HTTP/1.0 proxy server. Squid offers a rich access control, authorization and logging environment to develop web proxy and content serving applications.

• memcached – memcached is a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, which speeds up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load.

• Tomcat Servlet container server software, which processes Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) applications to provide dynamic web pages.

See the Information Resources section of the Installing the Web Development Stack for information about using the Web Stack components.

Cool Stack Software

Cool Stack software is a similar collection of open source AMP stack software, and was the predecessor and inspiration for the Web Stack project. Cool Stack, officially known as Sun Optimized Web Stack, is optimized for the Solaris 10 OS, and provides standalone packages that can be installed onto the Solaris 10 OS. Cool Stack does not deliver components into the OpenSolaris project, as Web Stack does.

You can find product information about Cool Stack at Sun Optimized Web Stack for the Solaris 10 OS.

You can download Cool Stack from http://cooltools.sunsource.net/coolstack/.