On the "Learn Computer" site there's a recent post that wonders if the web development standard of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) stack is "still strong" and will still stand up with new technologies.

This year in tech (like almost every other year) has been filled with buzzwords. Many of them this year, however, are based around big data processing and web content: NoSQL, Hadoop, BigTable - the list goes on. With all the fuss around these new technologies, one might be tempted into thinking that these are the technologies of the future, and that from now on our servers and websites will be built upon, leaving technologies like LAMP in the dust.

They talk about some of the things the LAMP stack doesn't do well like difficulties with scalability on both the web server and database side. There's also mention of the things that it does do well, like getting things up and running quickly and with a solid structure.

That being the case, the LAMP stack is still going very strong, and it's definitely still extremely viable in small and medium-sized deployments; there are no signs of it waning in that regard, and I'd expect it to be a standard deployment for many companies and organizations for quite some time to come.

Andi Gutmans has a new post to his site about a recent update to the offerings on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) - it now offers Zend Server 6 as an installable option.

Zend Server 6 is the ideal application platform for mobile and web applications, and this version brings a new level of enterprise capabilities. [...] Today, I'm also pleased to share that this newest version of Zend Server is now available on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace. Now, for one combined fee with Amazon Web Services, you can run your applications on a fully supported PHP application platform with Zend Server 6 running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Ubuntu Linux.

If you're interested in what Zend Server has to offer, check out the product page on the Zend website. Zend Server handles a lot of the base level things for you and can help you get up and running quickly. It includes things like detailed monitoring, error tracking, code tracing and a nice UI to for management and configuration of the server.

In this new post to her site Lorna Mitchell shares a handy tip for those using Ubuntu (or a Debian-based distribution) about how to manage your PHP 5.4 extensions and the "php5enmod" tool.

My shiny new VPS* runs Ubuntu 12.10 (official subtitle: Quantal Queztal. Local nickname: Quirky Kestrel) and therefore has PHP 5.4 installed. It's very new so every command I type is missing, and today I realised that included a PECL module (pecl_http, of course). [...] What's happened here is that all debian-flavoured unixes have adopted this standard for their PHP 5.4 packages, so if you're using debian, ubuntu, or any of their relatives with PHP 5.4, you'll see a directory structure like this. When you add a module to PHP, you'll add a file to the mods-available directory enabling the module and adding any config specific to it.

She points out that the "phpenmod" command, accompanied by the PECL extension to install, is the newer way to correctly get these extensions downloaded and configured correctly.

Tecmint.com has a new tutorial that walks you through the installation of a full LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) on a CentOS or RedHat installation.

This howto guide explains you'll how to install Apache Server with latest MySQL 5.5.27 and PHP 5.4.7 versions with php required following modules on RHEL 6.3/6.2/6.1/6.0/5.8/5.6, CentOS 6.3/6.2/6.1/6.0/5.8/5.6 and Fedora 12,13,14,15,16,17 systems using Remi repository via Yum tool.

Thankfully, package management has made things a lot simpler than they used to be. Most of the time you're only a few commands away from a working installation (if all you need are the generic setups). They explain what each piece of the installation is and how to set up the custom "Remi" yum repository to get the latest versions of the software - Including PHP 5.4. They show how to stop and start each of the servers (MySQL, Apache) and a few screenshots of what the output of your phpinfo page should look like.

As Brian Swan has mentioned in his latest blog post, the ODBC database driver for SQL Server on Linux has been released. This is a huge step forward for directly connecting linux-based systems (and programming languages) to this popular Microsoft product.

The first beta release of the SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux is available for download! As announced in October, the "Multiplatform Team" (a.k.a. the "MPlat Team") has released a preview version of a driver that will provide first-class access to SQL Server from applications running on Linux operating systems. The team is looking for feedback on this release to incorporate into their production-ready release, so try it out and let us know what you think.

He links to a few resources about the release - more details, a link to download the driver and the official documentation.

On the HowToForge.com site there's a new tutorial stepping you through the process of getting Cherokee+PHP+MySQL working on an Ubuntu linux installation.

Cherokee is a very fast, flexible and easy to configure Web Server. It supports the widespread technologies nowadays: FastCGI, SCGI, PHP, CGI, TLS and SSL encrypted connections, virtual hosts, authentication, on the fly encoding, load balancing, Apache compatible log files, and much more. This tutorial shows how you can install Cherokee on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The tutorial makes use of the package manager (apt-get) to install the needed software, so don't look for complete compiling information from this process. They include a bit of the configuration of the Cherokee installation and how you enable PHP support via its interface. Screenshots of the Cherokee interface are included to help make it easier to follow along.

Elvin Haci has a recent post to his blog showing how he set up PHP and Python to work on the same machine, just on different ports of the same Apache instance. His example is based on Ubuntu, but the principles can be used just about anywhere.

Today i decided to install Python in Ubuntu OS and to use PHP and Python both together. If i hadn't installed php and wanted to have python as only localhost in my OS, so it was easy, there are plenty of examples which show how to do it(for example). But if you have already installed php and you want to have python, then let's go on. Of course we need two different ports if we want to do so. And i could easily install and test it. So i am sharing how i did it.

He includes all of the commands and configuration changes you'll need to get Python and Apache all set up (he assumes you already have PHP installed). He also includes a full listing of his Apache config file so you can get a feel of how it all fits together using the VirtualHosts.

In a new post to his blog Hannes Magnusson mentions that the PHP packages for Ubuntu linux installs are woefully out of date and can make a developer's live even more difficult than it already can be. It help ease the situation a bit, he's figured out how to provide custom PHP 5.3 packages to anyone who wants them through a service called Launchpad.

Launchpad makes it really easy to provide your own custom packages, and even has a vast build farm to build packages automatically for different architectures and different Ubuntu releases. The only down side is it doesn't build rpm packages.. Thats fine by me, but that would be really useful for those wishing to deploy on a RedHat based distro.

He took the current package and pulled out a lot of the setup to make a "vanilla" installation. You can then look over at the PHP 5.3 PPA he's provided on his Launchpad account and grab this most up to date package.

Christian Weiske has a recent post to his site looking at something most PHP developers don't even think about when serving up their scripts - the MIME types for PHP files.

While setting some svn properties at work, we wondered about the correct MIME type for .php files.

He found several in the official IANA list including "text/php", "application/php" and "application/x-http-php" - all valid but none of them considered a standard. He talks about the ones supported by linux distributions (like Debian/Ubuntu) and some reasoning that might make "application/php" the best choice of the list. He points out some downsides to the choice, though, including the fact that something starting with "application/" should considered "machine readable" only despite PHP just being text.

On PHP.net there's a quick security advisory for those that didn't see the news - the wiki.php.net machine was compromised but has been wiped and all accounts reset and requiring a password reset.

The wiki.php.net box was compromised and the attackers were able to collect wiki account credentials. No other machines in the php.net infrastructure appear to have been affected. Our biggest concern is, of course, the integrity of our source code. We did an extensive code audit and looked at every commit since 5.3.5 to make sure that no stolen accounts were used to inject anything malicious. Nothing was found. The compromised machine has been wiped and we are forcing a password change for all svn accounts.

The issue was caused by a combination of a problem with the wiki software and a Linux root exploit. The Register has additional comments about the issue and outage.