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First of all, a web server is nothing more then a piece of software that hands out web pages when a request comes in. Requests are generally made by a web browser, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. Normally, these pages are 'static', meaning that they do not change their appearance based on certain factors. These factors could include how they the page was reached (e.g.: When a request comes in through Google, the page may say 'Welcome, Google user!') or what the geographical location of the person is (and therefore defaulting to a specific language, showing US clients English text and German clients German text). The software that takes care of these so-called 'dynamic pages' is called a 'server side script language'.

When a dynamic website is taken one step further and a database is used to store settings and text of all the written pages, all pages can be queried from the database and the layout and menu structure can be automatically updated to reflect additions, deletions or changes. Changes or additions can easily be made by logging in to your website with a user name and password, allowing the editor to perform updates from any browser, on any computer, without having to install specific software.

Internet Information Services (IIS) is a Microsoft web server that comes with every Windows version since Windows 2000 and therefore can be installed with any default Windows installation. IIS also comes with a 'server side script language', called ASP which stands for Active Server Pages.

While ASP is a strong language, it is also a proprietary one. This is turn means that there is an Open Source alternative out there: PHP.

The meaning of PHP is not completely clear: Some refer to it as 'Pre-Hypertext Processor', others refer to is as the Hypertext Pre-Processor -which never made much sense to me-. No matter the name, PHP is a very powerful script language that is used in many web based applications. PHP is not a small language either: Companies like Google and Yahoo are known to use PHP!

So, why look for an alternative if it already comes with Windows? There are several reasons to go this route:

• The licensing costs for IIS can turn out to be high for an Internet enabled server

• The availability of web applications written in ASP is low compared to the vast quantity of scripts and applications for PHP

• The standard installation of Windows does not include a database, so this needs to be purchased additionally

Both Microsoft and Oracle have 'free' versions of their database software, however these versions are stripped down to the bare essentials and only support a limited number of concurrent users.

The alternative to all of the above using a combination of the Apache web server, PHP as the server side script language and MySQL as the back end database.

Apache is not a small product either: As per the February 2007 Netcraft survey of web servers on the Internet, 58 percent of all web servers are running Apache versus 31 percent running IIS.

The good thing about this setup is that all three are open source packages and all three will run on Windows, Linux or Mac. If a website becomes highly successful and needs more server power, it is relatively easy to pick up all the information, scripts and database sources and move them to an other machine, even an other operating system.

The downside of using this approach is that some applications that you may use already require IIS to run. There are a number of ways to get around this but it is important to know that it is even possible to run IIS and Apache on the same physical machine.

Over the next chapters, you will see that the use of PHP offers a number of advantages when using Open Source Software, so bear with me on this one.

The combination of Apache, Mysql and PHP (AMP) running on Windows or Linux is often referred to as WAMP or LAMP.

If you would like to try out Apache, Mysql and PHP, it is easy to install and play with on any Windows machine by downloading the software from http://www.apachefriends.org. Apache Friends has build a Windows Installer which installs and pre-configures everything for you. After installation -which takes less then 5 minutes- you will have a fully functional web server installed on your local machine, including a professional grade database and the PHP script language. There are even some sample applications installed.