IBM’s Developerworks section has a good tutorial for setting up a PHP / MySQL Development Environment on a Windows XP machine, here is a Link to the Resource if you are interested in checking this out. This is pretty much what I do on my test machine so that I can stress test applications before I load them onto a working production box for deployment. It is definitely the way to go in my opinion if you can afford the costs related to having another machine on your desktop.
Before you do this though you will want to make sure that you have a few prerequisites in place, here are some tutorials also provided by IBM that might be worth checking out, especially if you are new to php/mysql development:
- Creating dynamic Web sites with PHP and MySQL
- Access an enterprise application from a PHP script
- Introduction to PHP
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