I have spent a long time tracking down a “best use” environment in which to test PHP pages that I develop. Many IDEs claim to have “PHP Support” and some of them work fine, however there is always work that has to be done after a page is developed to ensure that it works properly with the myriad of browsers in use today. Annoyed with this fact, and wishing to find a simple environment I stumbled upon WampServer.
I have been using Wamp for a few weeks and my development time has been cut in half. I work on the copies in the WampServer’s “www” folder, rather than a live server. The same results could have been achieved by manually installing Apache, PHP, mySQL and phpMyAdmin on my local machine; but WampServer installs and configures all four software packages to work properly with one another. Wamp does this all without changing the default install options. That’s right, the default options produce a working product (which seems to be rare these days).
Working out of the box is not the only benefit; WampServer can be configured to replicate any server, with any version of the software Wamp is running. Need to replicate your server with version 3.0.x of mySQL? You can install it in Wamp and test using outdated software. Wamp will even alert you when a version of software will not work with the rest (I have never come across this, but it is listed as a feature).
Developing software in my choice of editing software also made me happy. I did not have to learn the intricacies of new editing software to use Wamp. I used UltraEdit to write my pages and tested with any browser I had installed (IE, Chrome, Safari, Firefox). I simply navigated to http://localhost/ and I was able to test any pages I had placed in the WampServer.
So if you are looking for an easy to set up PHP Development Environment, with little-to-no learning curve, you would do well to give WampServer a try.
