The Apache HTTP Server, commonly referred to as Apache is a web server notable for playing a key role in the initial growth of the World Wide Web and in 2009 became the first web server to surpass the 100 million web site milestone. Apache was the first viable alternative to the Netscape Communications Corporation web server (currently known as Sun Java System Web Server), and has since evolved to rival other Unix-based web servers in terms of functionality and performance. The majority of all web servers using Apache are Linux web servers.
Apache is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. The application is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Unix, GNU, FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Novell NetWare, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, TPF, and eComStation. Released under the Apache License, Apache is characterized as free software and open source software.
Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the World Wide Web. As of March 2009 Apache served over 46% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest.
MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS) which has more than 6 million installations. The program runs as a server providing multi-user access to a number of databases.
The project's source code is available under terms of the GNU General Public License, as well as under a variety of proprietary agreements. MySQL is owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm, the Swedish company MySQL AB, now a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, which holds the copyright to most of the codebase. On April 20th, 2009 Oracle Corp., which develops and sells the proprietary Oracle database, announced a deal to acquire Sun Microsystems.
While PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995, the main implementation of PHP is now produced by The PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is noformal specification. PHP is free software released under the PHP License, however it is incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), due to restrictions on the usage of the term PHP.
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. It generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating web pages as output. It can be deployed on most web servers and on almost every operating system and platform free of charge. PHP is installed on more than 20 million websites and 1 million web servers.
