“The basic components were obvious. There was no budget, so
the software had to be free. We needed to prove that WE could
do it, so off-the-shelf packages weren’t much of a choice. It had
to fulfil our unstated belief that what’s now called ‘open source’
software is not just a match for commercial alternatives, but in
many cases is hands-down winner. There was no contest: it was
going to be Linux for the operating system, Apache as the webserver
and then a suitable database and a mixture of whatever seemed best
to write the database queries and presentation logic in.”
“Linux was easy. We’d been using it for long enough and since it
never crashes, takes next to no maintenance and runs on low-spec
hardware as well as commercial systems do on high-end servers, it’s
hard to see how anyone with the normal number of brain cells could
see much else as an alternative, apart from the other free
Unix-alikes.”
“Apache calls for ‘ditto’. Its flexibility of configuration and
use goes way beyond anything we would ask it to do and whilst it’s
performance isn’t at the ‘screaming’ end of the scale, raw
performance was the last thing on our minds anyway. We were
thinking in terms of hits per minute, not thousands per
second.”
“The database called for at least two seconds’ worth of thought.
The contenders were mySQL and Postgres. A straw poll around the
table demonstrated that we had in-house knowledge of mySQL and none
of Postgres, plus the view that mySQL was more than adequate for
the job. So that was that decision made.”