2.10. Languages, Technologies, and Databases

If you've gotten this far, you probably already have a good idea of what technologies you're going to build your application with. Using the right tools for the job is important; I'm not going to recommend that you start using any particular technology over another. While this book covers some specific technologies, the general lessons and advice can be applied to all development models, from the open source LAMP architecture, right through to the full Microsoft application stack.

It's always a good idea to use base technologies that have already been proven to work well together. Although using the latest trendy language or framework might be all the rage, stacks that have been proven to work at large scales are going to save you time and effort. Being on the bleeding edge for every element of your application can soon become tiring. You don't want to get yourself into the position of having to wonder if the web server is at fault every time you hit a bug. The LAMP stack has been used for many large-scale applications over the last few years and is a stable and well-understood platform to build on.

The examples in this book focus mainly on PHP, with Perl alternatives shown where appropriate. When we talk about web servers, we generally mean Apache, although the underlying operating system is irrelevant. For the database portion of this book, we'll be focusing quite heavily on MySQL 4 (specifically the InnoDB storage engine), with lots of MySQL-specific advice and ideas. Whether you're planning to base your architecture on PostgreSQL, Oracle Grid, or SQL Server, it's still a good idea to read the database sections because much of the advice transfers well.