Web Application Design, Development & Innovation in Cape Town

In todays times, if you’re hosting your website in the public domain with a web host, it’s most likely that you will have some sort of platform already setup for you where you can just copy the files from the open source application of your choice’s website straight to the file space setup for you by your web host. Go through the simple install wizard most open source applications have these days and you’re done.

However, if you’ve been given the task of setting up that same environment and open source application on your internal company website, on a server that has absolutely nothing on it except for the operating system, you’ve probably spent many long hours, even days cracking your brain over technical details and configuration quirks you’re required to know in setting these systems up. Especially if you’re new to the whole LAMP platform and open source applications in general. This stuff is supposed to be simple right.

Well, there is an easy way to get everything setup.

BitNami allows you to download pre-setup open source applications very quickly and easily. Here is there introduction from their website.

We created BitNami as a place to help spread the adoption of freely available, high quality Open Source web applications. BitNami will make it easier than ever to discover, download and install Open Source software such as document and content management systems, wikis and blogging software. We’ve built several BitNami Stacks that allow you to get applications such as Joomla!, Drupal, Mediawiki, and WordPress up and running in just a few clicks on Linux, Windows or OS X. They are so easy to install, anyone can do it!

They’re called Stacks, because that’s what they are, you stack one system on top of the other that eventually gives you the right environment for the open source application to run smoothly.

You can choose to download a simple install file that sets up only the environment for certain (most) open source applications to function, called LAMP , WAMP or MAMP Stacks, which is the abbreviation for Linux/Windows/Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP.

Or, you can also download an Application Stack, which is the whole environment plus the open source application, which makes things even more simple. Anything from forums to wikis to enterprise blogging platforms or portals. Everything is done for you. All you have to do is download the install file, go through the setup wizard and you’re setup and ready to roll. Neat huh.