XAMPP is awesome

While a am working on my secret project, I found a need for a local developing and testing environment which would provide the functionality of a LAMP stack (a WAMP Stack in my case). I had known about this nifty tool for a while, but had never had a chance to play with it at all. It's called XAMPP - it is essentially a WAMP or LAMP or MAMP stack rolled into ONE pre-configured package that you can run on just about any system.

All I had to do was download the package, extract it into a folder, and run the batch file. Using the provided control panel I started Apache and MySQL. It is working like a charm making my development experience very pleasant.

• Why would you need a local development environment?
  When you develop tools for the web, most of the time you cannot test them locally unless you have a Web Server that can execute server side scripting languages such as PHP and Perl. One way to get around this is by uploading your files to a web server such as your website host. This can get annoying pretty quickly, because with every change you make, you have to upload the file, then open it in the browser and test
• How does XAMPP solve this problem?
  XAMPP emulates your web server on your local machine. Therefore you can directly modify the files you are working on, save, and test. There is no need to upload anything. This makes life a lot easier when you are the developer and tester.

Next time you need a quick Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL setup, check out XAMPP. It will save you tons of time in trying to install and configure those tools from scratch.