When programming and developing for the Web I’ve always preferred a Linux box or, in the past few years, Mac OS X. Lately I’m finding myself on a Windows machine and before I go about installing Linux, I wanted to revisit the difficulty of setting up a development environment in Windows (mysql, php, apache). With XAMPP the whole process is remarkably easy.

XAMPP is also available for Linux and versions are in development for Mac OS X and even Solaris. As the documentation strongly states, XAMPP isn’t secure enough for a production environment and is only intended for development purposes. How long does it take to install on Windows? Let’s see…

With the installer version XAMPP is a 33 MB download, so that gives you time to read the documentation. On my connection the download took 3 minutes but there’s really not a lot to read.

The actual install was under 2 minutes. …. since I’m on a Spanish language version of Windows the installed location is C:\Archivos de programa\xampp … I guess that is “c:\Program Files\xampp” for most of you, rigth? I forget.

After installation the XAMPP Control pops up. At this point you need to be sure to have read the part about security. After configuring a couple of passwords you’re then ready to go.

So, just 15 minutes after beginning the download I now have mysql, php, phpmyadmin, apache, and a few other things all working fine on my Windows machine. Simple, I like that.

XAMPP also includes a little batch file that you can use to switch between PHP 5 and PHP 4. You have to stop the apache service first before running the batch file but the XAMPP control panel makes that easy.

Maybe it’s not all that difficult to install all these things individually anymore on Windows. It has been a while since I did that. But with XAMPP I don’t really see why anyone should bother if you just want a development machine. Unless, that is, you’re needing to work with a specific version of MySQL. The version supplied with XAMPP is 5.0.24a.

Of course, I always think that the best development environment is a developmental server that is similar to your production server (same OS, same configuration). But that’s not always a possibility.