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The basic purpose of the Apache web server is to serve text pages, images, and other static files. You can format those web-pages to appear nice, but they would lack dynamic functionality (i.e. the ability to change colors or font-size when the mouse moves over a link, button, etc). In other words using Apache web-server as a sole application would not make your web-pages more interesting.
If we want to add more features for our web-page (eg. dynamic functionality, security, e-commerce, etc), your webserver would need additional help. To add life to a website provide additional help requires several resources - more than just the web server is neededitself. A popular acronym to represent these foundations and servers is referred to as '''LAMP'''. It stands for '''Linux''', '''Apache''', '''MySQL''', and '''PHP ''' (or ''Python''). This week we will set up this stack "a LAMP solution" in order to give us support a website that does runs webmail (i.e. send and receive email in a web browser).