[bita]

Hi guys,

I'm reading a book for learning PHP, it offers to install WAMP for building my own development system.But it says that :

Quote

The security configurations
of such an installation(WAMP) will not be as tight as on a production web server, because
it is optimized for local use.

I don't understand what does the author mean by production server,and what's the difference between WAMP and Production Server.
and the other question is that when do we use WAMP and when do we use production server?

Thanks in advance.
Bita

[modi123_1]

The difference is not WAMP and production, but development vs production. You can have a WAMP setup be your production server, but what the author is warning about is you need to batten down the hatches and harden it from attack, exploit, and general misuse. In any development scenario you should have two environments... one to develop in with a more relaxed and debug friendly way and one that is where the code goes "live". For a server that means cutting off exposed ports, patching it, limiting access.. etc.. etc.

[Dormilich]

A production server is where you host your stuff publicly available. that means it is accessible 24/7 by everyone interested. WAMP (in this context) is an example for a development server (only you or a very small amount of people have access to it). and since most public web servers run on Linux, they can’t use WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP).

[Lemur]

LAMP is the Linux equivalent stack.

Other options to look into

Server - NginX, Cherokee, Lighttpd
Language - Rails, Django
Database - PostgreSQL, NoSQL

You're not forced to stick with the standard stack, and in most cases Apache is going to be extremely overkill.

Rails comes with some nice features for moving from Dev to Production.

[bita]

Dormilich, on 07 August 2012 - 09:39 AM, said:

A production server is where you host your stuff publicly available. that means it is accessible 24/7 by everyone interested. WAMP (in this context) is an example for a development server (only you or a very small amount of people have access to it). and since most public web servers run on Linux, they can’t use WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP).

Thanks for your answer.As you said most public web servers run on Linux, but I don't have any background of using Linux, so is it better to start web development by using Linux. I mean start learning how to use Linux and then learn web development. Is it much more worthful? or any suggestion you can give me as someone who wants to be a good web developer in the future, I would be thankful for that.

[Dormilich]

Unless you will host the production server yourself (i.e. become an ISP) there is no need to learn Linux for Web Development. Web stuff usually is OS-independent.

[Lemur]

Dormilich, on 07 August 2012 - 12:30 AM, said:

Unless you will host the production server yourself (i.e. become an ISP) there is no need to learn Linux for Web Development. Web stuff usually is OS-independent.

While I agree, it's nice to always know one level lower of abstraction. For a Web Dev, this is the basic workings of IIS, Apache, NginX, Unix, or other such bits.

Even though not immediately relevant, it does help in troubleshooting if you at least recognize names of errors. Knowing the differences between FTP (DON'T DO IT) and SFTP can mean the difference between being online and being site-jacked because someone sniffed your clear text passwords.