There
are loads of great technologies at work, much behind the scenes from
the end user, leveraging various
Open Source Software configurations - UNIX/Linux operating system, Apache
web server, PHP and a MySQL database.
You may
have noticed that the HTML code here isn't the typical code one finds
at most websites. Most of the pages were written in "PHP"
(Hypertext Preprocessor), an open source server-side scripting language
that performs functions similar to ASP, JSP and ColdFusion. PHP is especially
well suited for Web development for creating dynamic web pages, where
the code can be embedded into HTML.
The software
used to manage the data repository is MySQL, an Open Source Database,
designed for speed, power and heavy load use. This tool provides robust
features, speed, compactness, stability, ease of deployment and is available
at zero price under their GNU General Public License.
MacroMedia's
Dreamweaver HTML editor provided rich visual layout tools and
a text-editing environment. Since Dreamweaver does not include specific
support for writing PHP, most of the PHP code was hand edited using
Evrsoft's 1st Page, a powerful html/script editor.
1st Page
comes with an impressive interface and a mixture of all the best features
from several top-name HTML editors, and also includes 450 JavaScripts,
15 DHTML scripts, 17 Perl scripts, 6 HTML scripts, 2 CGI scripts - and
is freeware.