Xampp for Windows

I didn’t realize how out of date my Xampp installation was until I was reading a blog entry announcing  the release of version 1.6x. If you aren’t familiar with what exactly Xampp does, in a nutshell it puts all of the components you need for your development environment right on your development machine, even windows boxes. Xampp is an easy-to-install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. Compared to many other software products in its category like Apache2Triad, XAMPP is much better in my opinion as it is easier to use, has more features, and also allows you to switch between PHP versions in seconds. It is a complete web, database and FTP server package. Xampp is not only available for Windows, I know some folks who run Macs that use Xampp. Here’s a shortlist of what’s included:

• Apache HTTPD 2.2.8 + Openssl 0.9.8g
• MySQL 5.0.51a
• PHP 5.2.5
• PHP 4.4.8
• phpMyAdmin 2.11.4
• FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.25
• Mercury Mail Transport System 4.52

As well as a notice regarding those of us who are using Vista on our development machines:

Because missing or insufficient write permissions in the c:program files folder of the default vista installation, we recommend to use alternate folders for XAMPP e.g. c:xampp or c:myfolderxampp.

Source: apache friends – xampp for windows