During 2009 I have spent several months building a website using Drupal and Lamp. It was not too difficult to find howtos and forums and wikis which contained clear, easy-to-follow instructions on installing and configuring the various bits of software.

The site is up and running fine but nowhere in my searches,so far, have I been able to find an explanation/understanding of how all the pieces of the jigsaw interact with one another. Eg when a visitor requests a webpage, or inputs some piece of data, what broad processes take place and what information is exchanged between apache, php (or phpmyadmin), Drupal modules, sql (or msqladmin) and the database to transform the input into output and/or modify the content of the database?

I realise these are big questions but if anyone can point me towards something other than how-tos it would be a big step forward for me.

It may well exist, but what you're asking for doesn't really seem logical. LAMP in itself is nothing special, just convention. the database does all the databasey stuff, PHP does all the web code etc... In your example when an end user makes a request, if the request fulfilling data is in the database, then PHP will query the database as coded. Apache doesn't get involved at all other than to serve the pages. Naturally things like phpmyadmin play no part whatsoever in the function of the application stack, they're just management tools.

Thanks for your response. You seem to start from a position of 'understanding' while I do not. I do appreciate your attempt to help.

The first difficulty for all of us who start from ignorance is in framing our problem in a way that makes sense to those who already have the understanding. I don't think I succeeded.

Again, I think the main mistake is thinking of "LAMP" as a thing in itself, when it's just a convention, and has no technical substance to it at all. Break it apart into it's constituent pieces and then ask questions about those building blocks.

Thanks for your response. That is what I tried to do in my question.

PS I'm not looking for a quick explanation really, just a pointer to someplace where I can find a 'slow' explanation

Hello,

You can read up some about LAMP here and take it from there. There are a lot of links you can follow that will take you deeper ad deeper in your quest for knowledge.

Kind regards,

Eric

Thanks again. I appreciate your help. I've been to this wiki (and others) before. Maybe it's me but they seem to be written in a style and language that I can't follow. I've marked this thread as solved.

If you would just post what it is you can't follow then I'm sure someone will shed some light in the darkness.

Basically (very basically) if someone connects to your Drupal (that's PHP if I'm not mistaking) site, then Apache (the webserver) calls on the PHP engine to show (parses the php code) the pages that you have on the site. If data is needed from the MySQL database engine then the PHP code that takes care of database connectivity opens a connection to the database, executes its queries, reports the results back to PHP (which shows them on your output page) which in turn get shown through Apache and closes the connection. You might look at Apache as a 'service provider' (webservice), PHP as a 'connection provider' (parse code, open database connections and such) and MySQL as a 'data provider' (holds the database).

This is very basic but if you want to know more then you'll have to keep looking or ask more specific questions on things that you have doubts about.

Kind regards,

Eric