Developing Web Applications in Windows
February 26th, 2008Read More Windows, programming, web design, web development
My favourite platform for web development has to be Ubuntu Linux. As a desktop system to work on (rather than play) I think it is unsurpassed. However there are some times that you really need to use windows. For example my laptop seems to refuse to install Ubuntu which means that I am forced to stick with windows XP for the time being. However windows can be a perfectly adequate web development environment.
One of the trickiest aspects of web development on windows used to be setting up the Apache, MySQL and PHP stack. However this is no longer the case thanks to the wonderful little package called XAMPP. This is short for XP, Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl.
Xampp allows you to run a webserver on your local computer. This allows for superfast editing and checking of your web application. Anyone who has repeatededly edited and FTP’ed a file to a webserver will know that it can quickly become a pain and definitely slows down your performance as a programmer.
By editing the file locally and simply refreshing your web browser you can quickly see how your web design is looking or ensure that your PHP is not throwing any errors etc.
Furthermore, using XAMPP allows you to start and stop the entire web server stack easily from one simple control panel.
Download XAMPP from here
