The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and its related documentation. In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and documentation to the project.

This web server is the leading webserver on the Internet today with a 67% marketshare; it is used by ISPs and commercial organizations world-wide for production applications. With the ease of administration, costs, open-source nature of the webserver, and tremendous 'free' support available from the user-community, this was the natural choice for SummitCMS.

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

According to NetCraft, it is a mainstream development tool currently used on 30% of websites. It is also used in production by company's such as Yahoo! and is highly reliable.

Again, with the ease of administration, costs, open-source nature of the webserver, and tremendous 'free' support available from the user-community, this was the natural choice for SummitCMS.

The SummitCMS web platform has not been tested on PHP 5.x; due to some backwards compatability issues, it is anticipated that some changes will be required. However, PHP 4.x is still, by far, the most common version and is likely to remain so for some time to come.

MySQL, the most popular Open-Source SQL database management system, is developed, distributed, and supported by MySQL AB. MySQL AB is a commercial company, founded by the MySQL developers.

It should be noted that the SummitCMS platform leverages PEAR as a database abstraction layer; that means that the system should be able to use a number of alternative database engines on the back-end: Frontbasel, Interbase, Informix, MiniSQL, MS SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle 7/8/9, ODBC, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Sybase. The SummitCMS API is used to submit database requests and the database abstraction layer translates the request for submission to the database server. In this fashion it is possible to support multiple database types without rewriting the web application framework.

PEAR is short for "PHP Extension and Application Repository." It is a community-driven project with the PEAR Group with over 900 members contributing to the code.

One of the major design goals of the SummitCMS platform is portability. It is designed to run on any system capable of running the Apache web server and PHP. 

With this in mind, the SummitCMS platform has been successfully tested and deployed using Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, and MS Windows. While not tested, the underlying technologies also support Mac OSX and Novell Netware; in theory, SummitCMS should work on these as well

Windows Notes:

Apache 2.0 recommends running a Windows NT-based system when using a Microsoft Operating System; this includes all versions of Windows based on the NT kernel: Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows .Net Server 2003. Running Apache on Windows 9x is not thoroughly tested and not recommended on production systems.

• On all operating systems, TCP/IP networking must be installed and working. 
• On Windows NT 4.0, installing Service Pack 6 is strongly recommended, as Service Pack 4 created known issues with TCP/IP and Winsock integrity that were resolved in later Service Packs.

NetWare Notes:

Apache 2.0 is designed to run on NetWare 6.0 service pack 3 and above. If you are running a service pack less than SP3, you must install the latest NetWare Libraries for C (LibC).

Apache 2.0 for NetWare can also be run in a NetWare 5.1 environment as long as the latest service pack or the latest version of the NetWare Libraries for C (LibC) has been installed . WARNING: Apache 2.0 for NetWare has not been targeted for or tested in this environment.