Sun Delivers AMP Stack for Solaris and Linux, Windows Coming

Published: August 5, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Just after IT Jungle went on hiatus for a little rest and relaxation in the hot New York City summer, Sun Microsystems announced a so-called AMP stack--short for Apache, MySQL, and Perl/Python/PHP--for the Solaris and Linux operating systems.

Now that Sun owns the open source MySQL database--inasmuch as anyone can own open source software--the company should, in theory, be able to leverage MySQL, which is at the heart of zillions of dynamic content Web sites, to a profitable advantage. The Sun Web Stack will put this idea to the test.

The Web Stack includes Web and proxy servers, plus scripting languages to link Web pages back to the MySQL database, and technically, it is larger than just the three Ps of Web development plus the Apache Web server and the MySQL database. The stack includes the Apache 2.2.8 Web server and the Apache Modules Memcached 1.2.5 (which adds the distributed memory object system to the Web server), the MySQL 5.1 relational database, the lighttpd Web server v1.4.18 (in case you don't want to use Apache), the Tomcat 6.0.16 servlet engine for Apache, plus a slew of scripting tools, including PHP 5.2.5, Ruby 1.8.6, Rails 1.2.3, RubyGems 0.9.0, Mongrel 1.0.1, fcgi package (for CGI processing), the RedCloth text parser, Perl 5.8.8 and its extensions, and the Squid proxy server 2.16.x. That is apparently a partial listing of the stack, but you get the idea. It is like Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell--stacked. These components, including the Java System Web Server 7.0 and Web Proxy components in the Java Enterprise System, are now part of the open source OpenSolaris project and have been open sourced under the BSD software license. Sun will release this source code in the third quarter (which means sometime before the end of September).

While the Sun Web Stack is available now for download, which you can do here, enterprise-class support is not going to be available for Web Stack on Solaris until sometime in the third quarter, with Linux tech support coming in the fourth quarter, and Windows and other operating systems getting support for the Sun Web Stack at some unspecified point after that. Sun has not yet announced what the prices are for supporting the Web Stack.

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