Using LAMP's Ideas With Java

Filed in archive Application Development on February 11, 2006

Tim Bray, who works for Sun MicroSystems, has posted an article in his blog that I could not ignore once I saw the title. The title of the post is LAMP and Java and it combines to subjects that I've thought a lot about over the past year. LAMP seems to be all the rage lately.

I work with a number of "Infrastructure" folks who think the concept is heresy and refuse to even discuss it with me. I can only assume that with all the experience they have accumulated with Solaris, AIX or whatever other OS that lives on heavy metal hardware they don't want to consider such a radical change.

Then there are those of us who use Java and think it fits the bill in many situations. Sure with Ruby, Python or PHP we would be able to hack together something over a weekend that would work (yes I'm leaving PERL out intentionally). The problem I see with that though is that in three months time some manager will ask me for some overly complex feature. At the point I will need an IDE, the security and the potential framework that Java already provides that the others don't.

This leads me to LAMP/J or spelled out simply Linux, Apache, MySQL, Tomcat and Java (LAMTJ ?). At first I did not believe that this was a serious solution. Then an incredibly smart and stubborn developer insisted that this type of solution be deployed to host a major web application within our organization. One year later his solution proved itself and the organization saved tens of thousands of dollars in: hosting, hardware, application server purchases, and database license purchases. Who did this solution make nervous? Those people made nervous were those that argued against the idea in the first place: UNIX administrators, DBAs and Application Server vendors (cough... IBM). The idea behind LAMP isn't just selecting a new stack but a sort of cultural change within an IT organization.

Right now the ideas behind LAMP are buried so deep in nerd thought that I wonder how the decision makers in IT organization can be educated about its use. Sure I hear that Amazon, Google and Ebay are using LAMP but this does not seem to me to be common knowledge among those desicion makers that matter. It will not be the vendors with their big marketing budgets because they have zero incentive to do so. Right now it has to be those few developer/evangelists who can influence and hope that this will catch on everywhere.