In a new article on Builder.com, Brendon Chase shows you how to get a LAMP development environment fired up without the hassles of configuring everything from scratch -- using XAMPP. XAMPP is a single packaged download from Apache Friends which provides all of the pieces of software needed, plus more you probably don't need, to make Apache installations with server-side scripting and a few database options ready to go in a testing or development environment. The article focuses on getting XAMPP running on Linux (it will also work on Windows and a version for Sun's Solaris is also available). The example in the article uses a Debian-based Linux distribution, but just about any flavour of Linux will work.

Sometimes, working with all of the different technologies involved with a LAMP setup can get frustrating. There are just many things to coordinate between the different pieces of software. This package seems to help simplify the installation, and includes functionality like: Apache 2, Mysql 4, SQLite, Sablotron, mod_perl, cURL, and many more. One warning, however: XAMPP is recommended to be only used in a development environment and not in production as the system has very loose security settings.