Looking for lightweight PHP stack for development on Windows

Question

Hello All, I'm looking to setup a lightweight, developer only web stack on Windows (and possible OSX). Ideally, I'd be working with Zend framework, MySQL. But I'm open to other APIs to facilitate creating RESTFul (or pseudo-Restful) web services. I've seen some tools, like QuickPHP, but it might have been too lightweight as I couldn't get everything working that I wanted. I'm not opposed to installing Apache and all that, but was just curious if there's some other tools I'm not seeing to get up to speed quickly.

Keep in mind that this is for local development only.

Thank you.

Answer 1

For my local OSX development I've used MAMP. I highly recommend it.

For Windows I'm sure you already know about a WAMP and I haven't used anything else.

Answer 2

I would look into XAMPP. But I prefer to install and configure Apache and PHP myself, and not use a pre-rolled solution.

Answer 3

The thing is, you want your development environment to behave the same way as your production environment, so I would suggest installing whatever you are going to deploy to. I run a LAMP stack on my server, so I run WAMP on Windows for development. It is very easy to install and I don't notice it slowing down my laptop. You can also look at XAMPP, but after trying both, I prefer WAMP.

Answer 4

Ahh, thanks guys. I forgot about XAMPP and never heard about WAMP.

Just the answers I was looking for.

(BTW, I'm working with an application that will probably never see the light of day, basically putting together a fancy mockup and prototype code, which is why I don't really want to go through all the effort of dialing in a custom Apache setup.)

Answer 5

If you want to go really lightweight, make sure that when you install WAMP or XAMPP, don't set the services to start automatically with Windows.

It is fairly easy to fire them up using the WAMP/XAMPP console when you want to develop your application, but it saves you from running them all the time and slowing down your boot time.

Answer 6

I used WAMP and XAMPP, but now I install separately on my VISTA machine Apache 2.2, PHP 5.3, MySQL 5.1.4 (and for writing code Notepad++; for handling photos GIMP for Windows).

It is not that difficult to install. Just read attentively on PHP download page, which version of the PHP Windows installer goes for Apache 2.2 (there is one for the IIS too).

All this soft is highly customizable. It makes sense to spend some time and get it right.