SUSE Linux 10.0 Unleashed
| IN THIS CHAPTER
The primary open-source web-development tools are often lumped together as a makeshift suite called LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl/Python/PHP. Linux and Apache provide the base to deliver your web-based application; MySQL provides convenient data access; and scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and PHP handle much of the "heavy lifting" involved in working with the data and presenting it to the end user. The massive growth of the Web in the early 1990s fueled an interest in getting interesting things online quickly. The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) offered developers a way to produce dynamic content and add interaction to the Web by allowing a user to remotely execute a remote script or program on the server and returning the results. Many programmers had experience with Larry Wall's Practical Extraction and Report Language (Perl), so it was a natural choice to use in CGI programming. Perl quickly became the language of choice and it continues to play an important role in today's Internet. Perl can be a difficult language to learn, but it is easy to use after you understand how it works. It is highly flexible, with more than one way to do just about anything. That flexibility is what makes it a little complicated. Python is younger than Perl, but they have many things in common. They are both interpreted languages, have active cultures that center around the language and the philosophy behind it, and within their respective cultures, fun is a big component. Python is object oriented and has a cleaner syntax than Perl. Python has contributed substantially to the Web, not only as a scripting language, but also serving as the building blocks for applications such as Zope and BitTorrent. In this chapter, you'll get an overview of both languages and learn how to begin using them in SUSE Linux. |