“Early [E-commerce] sites that were built big, such as
Amazon.com, had to do it all by hand using the Common Gateway
Interface or Web server API technologies and lots of custom support
code.”
“Developers at some larger E-commerce sites still make use of
open-source software even though they may have expensive commercial
application servers and other commercial components. Open-source
software is becoming much more popular in the back office of
E-commerce sites. Perl, Apache, and GNU C/C++ development tools are
heavily used… In fact, the needs of E-commerce sites are becoming
more codified, so application servers are starting to look more
similar. Thus, the idea of open-source Web-development
platforms is making more sense.
Among application servers, two packages, PHP and ZOPE, are
starting to gain a following. Since custom coding is a necessity
with application servers, there’s a big win if you can have access
to the source. Open-source software is particularly effective when
sites need to interface to other technologies. Using the
application servers on top of Linux means sites have access to
device driver-level source as well as developer APIs and the
low-level file-system code.”
“…as Linux matures into a proven multiprocessor and
high-availability operating system, it’s only a matter of time
before end-to-end E-commerce solutions start to appear on the
platform.”