Technical Info - Ray's Place

Built using LAMP, an Open-Source Software Stack

This website is built on open-source LAMP software technology. (LAMP is an acronym that stands for the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP, Perl or Python scripting languages.) LAMP is an alternative to expensive proprietary software stacks. It has a lower cost, excellent reliability and freedom from vendor lock-in.

The genealogical database uses GeneWeb, a Freeware open source program written by Daniel de Rauglaudre from France.

Two other programs play an important part in the development of this website. Although not an open source program, PHPEdit is the best IDE under windows to work with PHP scripting language. It is used to write and edit the code for this site. The other is an open source program, PHPMyAdmin, and is used to handle the administration of the MySQL database.

This web site excluding the GeneWeb database is designed with XHTML web standards and Cascading Style Sheets. XHTML is a reformulation of HTML in XML, and combines the strength of HTML with the power of XML. Cascading Style Sheets is a simple mechanism for adding style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing) to Web documents. Both the markup structure and CSS presentation validate with the W3C.

Some of the benefits of using web standards are:

  • Faster loading times - less bandwidth
  • Fewer browser incompatibility headaches
  • Presentation is separate from structure to ease design and maintenance costs
  • This web site will work as well in the future as it does today
fedora Fedora™ Core 2 - Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source Linux server and general purpose operating system
apache Apache 2 - the most popular web server on the Internet - more than 64% of the web sites on the Internet are using Apache
MySQL MySQL 4 - the world's most popular open source relational database server
PHP PHP 5 - a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML - XHTML
GeneWeb GeneWeb - stand-alone web enabled genealogical database software
Valid XHTML 1.0! Valid XHTML™ 1.0 Strict! - a formal validation successfully performed on raysplace.org by the W3C Markup Validation Service
Valid CSS! Valid CSS - a formal validation successfully performed on the raysplace.org style sheet by the W3C CSS Validator