Just writing a couple of lines of HTML code is not enough for most web sites; dynamic content is what people want today. To tell the truth, most commercial web sites offer more dynamic content than visitors really want—Flash-driven animations that greet you instead of useful information, for instance, or interactive JavaScript menus that make information harder to retrieve instead of easier—but in this chapter we give you an introduction to offering basic dynamic content that’s really useful.

Linux is—you guessed it—an excellent platform for serving dynamic content. A bazillion web sites serving dynamic content are already running on Linux today; this is one of the foremost application areas where Linux excels.

Dynamic content can be achieved by two entirely different ways of programming: server-side programming and client-side programming. JavaScript, Java applets, and the Microsoft-specific ActiveX platform are the most common ways of producing interactive HTML pages with client-side programming.

Because of limitations in these technologies, however, most sites with substantial information to deliver use server-side programs. You can use them in many different flavors with many different software packages, but one combination has become ubiquitous for implementing these techniques. This combination is so common nowadays that it even has received a phony acronym: LAMP, which is short for Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP. We have already talked about the Apache web server, and this whole book is about Linux, so what we have left to talk about here are the latter two packages—MySQL and PHP—as well as how the four packages go together.

To obtain a working LAMP installation, you will need to have Apache set up as described in “Configuring Your Own Web Server” in Chapter 22, as well as to install MySQL and PHP. We will cover how to get the latter two applications running in this chapter.

Before we get into the technical details, however, we should review why you might want to bother setting up and learning how to use a LAMP system.

LAMP makes it easy to provide a large amount of content and allow users of your web site to navigate through it easily.

Let’s say you have a site with lots of JPEGs of photographs you’ve taken on numerous occasions. Visitors may want to view photographs using a number of different criteria. That is, some visitors want to see photographs of historic buildings, whenever you took them. Others might want to see photographs taken on your latest trip, whenever that was.

To make navigation and retrieval easy, you start by inserting the information about your JPEGs into a MySQL database. (The JPEG files will remain on the filesystem where Apache can get to them quickly.) You organize them any way you want (by subject matter, by trip, and so on) and store all this information in tables within the database. In other words, data is stored in tables, and a number of related tables make up a database.

Now you provide a form on your web site that visitors can fill out to indicate the dimension along which they want to view photographs. The form could be as simple as that shown in Figure 25-1.

Figure 25-1. A simple input form

Your next page is a dynamic one, along the lines of that which we describe in this chapter. A bit of PHP code retrieves the visitor’s request and determines what is displayed in the page. This could look like Figure 25-2.

Where is the MySQL in all this? It’s not immediately visible, but it plays a crucial role behind the scenes because it is queried by the PHP code. The combination of inline PHP code and a fast database makes the whole experience fairly pleasant for the visitor.

Figure 25-2. A dynamic web page generated by PHP