This article will explain how a development system solves such a problem and how to install the popular Windows-based web development platform WAMP. As a relative newcomer to the PHP language, I hope this article speaks directly to other new programmers who are interested in honing their development skills to eventually become PHP masters.

They explain some of the things that the WAMP server has to offer and how to set it all up (complete with screenshots). Their example configuration just uses the default "localhost" hostname and runs as the "www" user. If you want to get into more of the configuration options available in the tool, you can check out the project's site for details.

I wanted to do exactly that, and at work we use WampServer so we can easily switch between PHP versions (and it also makes enabling/disabling extensions and options very easy - if you develop on Windows, check it out). Assuming you have WampServer installed, it is fairly trivial to manually install new versions of the AMP trifecta.

There's a few things you'll need to download to get things up and running (besides the new PHP version) but the rest of the guide is simple configuration and startup. If all goes well, you should be running the alpha in less than ten minutes.

Test Driven Development and xUnit seem to be popular among many of the professional and very public programmers, so I thought I might like to give it a whirl and see if I can improve the flexibility of my source code and better decouple objects. Unfortunately, I use WAMPServer on Windows as a development server while at work so directions for installing PHP related plugins/PEAR aren't exactly identical. (Usually, I can figure it out fairly quickly.)

His installation technique involved having the PEAR tools installed so you can just pull it from the PHPUnit channel. Then all you'll need to do discover the PHPUnit channel and call the "install" and let it do the rest of the work. For those wondering, this is pretty similar to the installation process on a unix-based system, just without the Windows-specific script calls.

For those readers who do not develop PHP on Windows platform WampServer is probably the most popular Apache + MySQL + PHP package for Windows. MySQL Administrator on the other hand, is a part of MySQL GUI Tools package. The problem with this pair, is that they don't want to work together. At least not right out of box.

Connecting the two directly does require editing the Windows registry, so if you're a bit hesitant of that, you might look for other ways to administer the MySQL install that comes with WampServer.