With the abundance of communication between the browser and a server in these days of AJAX and JSON data interchange, there has never been a better time to get your own development web server set up so that you can test all those dynamic scripts you're writing. This article will show you how to do it using some of the most popular software.

They start by setting up an Apache web server and follow it with PHP first then MySQL second to round out the install. Most of the installers are pretty simple for the Windows-based systems (the developers of them have done a great job) so the install should go pretty smoothly.

My work station is WinXp system and my friend where I had to create it for has the new Vista and somewhere over 9000 pictures to be managed. On my system everything worked fine, but on my friends system i always got the error can not open file.

Further testing revealed that it was the OS at fault - Vista wasn't handling the memory usage for the application correctly. When it was run directly from the file explorer (versus in the PHP-GTK console) though, it worked just fine.

Over the past week or so I've been figuring out how to compile PHP on Windows, specifically Windows Vista. It's been an interesting ride since I'm not very familiar with compiling on Windows to start with. [...] If you are using Windows Vista, or intend updating/using Visual C++ Express 2008, then my blog entry is largely another coat of sugar on top of Elizabeth's guide to clear up any difference between the two approaches.

He lists the software you'll need to make the compile work (including Virtual Clone Drive, WinRAR, VS 2008 Express and the .NET Framework SDK) and then breaks it down into three steps - the installation of the development environment (and setup), downloading PHP/libraries to the environment and, of course, compiling the PHP instance to your specs (complete with command line calls to make it all happen).

As all of us are talking about the new coming Windows Vista, I decided to dedicate my first post to guide you all on how to setup IIS 7 along with MySQL and PHP 5.

He hadn't found a tutorial that covered getting all three working well together, so decided to create his own - complete with screen shots for each step of the way. First, IIS is set up, then PHP, then, finally, the MySQL installation is completed and all three are tied together. All downloads are linked as well to make it even easier to set your system up.