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When we started the project of an electronic auction PoloMercantil. com, we knew that the proprietary software costs too high for our financial resources. Our only option is to use open source software. However, the Open Source software code are plenty to choose from, and it is the systems analyst / programmer to select which best suit the objectives of the project. In our case we chose Linux as our operating system. Yet we face a big question: What distribution of Linux? There are dozens of Linux distributions, each with specific advantages, sometimes with or without payment for services. We chose Slackware Linux because we believe are best suited for our needs, in terms of stability and reliability. Slackware is a conservative distribution, meaning that only offered in the versions of the kernel of the plot and others libraries, once it has proven stable and reliable. As a result, Slackware is a Linux operating system more stable market. If the user the latest Linux kernel and libraries will, we recommend finding a different distribution. Another reason for choosing Slackware, it was because the text of the interface, which at first is a bit difficult in the long term, however, provides a better understanding of the Linux environment. So most Slackware configuration is done through text scripts.

Once established the operating system, Apache as our web server we chose. Apache is one of the most popular web servers on the Internet. For server programming language, we chose PHP. There is a very popular programming language. Our experience with Apache / PHP installation that it is very reliable, works very well in our production environment. Programming for the workstation, we chose javascript, which besides a simple syntax, which a wealth of resources. Apache web server is actually a complete Web server. Also can be very complex with many configuration settings. For our database, we chose PostgreSQL. This database is available to the public for more than 15 years, and besides being well debugged, it offers many resources has become one of the best options for open source database software. Very reliable, PostgreSQL has reported the existence of the production database with more than 4 terabytes. Besides all that PostreSQL not the most popular open source database. A matter of marketing? Probably.

As for the PHP programming language, we had to use an object-oriented structure of the application. There are many PHP application structures offered by Open Source Code license. Object-oriented application is very important because it makes programming very easy and scalable up to the point where the system can grow without much effort. It also helps to separate PHP code from HTML, to take the help of some specific libraries such as Smarty. We use Smarty library and we believe it is a very important source, which may even Web pages faster through the use of cache functions. Also a very large library systems are noteworthy PHP PEAR libraries. In the PEAR website, among the many libraries that offer, there are the DB interface and database MAIL_QUEUE, which sends e-mails using the database. When we reached PoloMercantil end of the project, we had a sort of use in real-time database replication. For this purpose we chose the DRBD Heartbeat and libraries.

The use of database replication is very important and should not be delayed. Just after 3 months of our system went into production, our server hard drive was bad. Use DRBD / Heartbeat we were able to manufacture the system in seconds without loss of data. DRBD / Heartbeat reproduction by using a wireless network between the server and the slave nodes. Our project also makes use of ImageMagick (enlarge and reduce images), iptables (firewall), TSearch2 (portgresql text search) and Mon (linux monitoring tasks). Also a very important library worth mentioning is the pseudo-APC compiler for PHP. Speed is always critical to Internet sites. PoloMercantil already in production and based on our experience we can say that the Open Source Code software we chose, proved extremely reliable and stable. Code Open Source software can be an excellent option for web development. Roberto Sedycias IT Consultant for PoloMercantil This article is under the GNU FDL license and can be distributed without prior permission of the author. But the name of the author and (any URL links) mentioned in the article and biography must be kept.