Web Development Environment…Easy as 1-2-3

January 5th, 2006

Back in the old days, which for me was about 1998, I remember how much of a pain it was to set up a web development environment on a computer. Go get this package, install this component, build with these options, etc.

That pain has been completely eliminated for me now. I use two standalone applications that give me a robust environment for developing with Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Apache/LightTPD on my PowerBook. For Rails I use Locomotive, which gives me a quick way to get a Ruby on Rails Environment up and running with LightTPD and FastCGI. I also use MAMP, to get a Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment setup quickly. MAMP even has a dashboard widget that lets you start and stop the servers.

If you’re on Windows and need a good Apache, MySQL, and PHP environment, I recommend WAMP. For Rails you can use: InstantRails

Update: Randy recommends XAMPP for Windows. I tried this today, and I must say it seems quite a bit better than WAMP. Thanks Randy.

Posted by Brian Sweeting Filed in Apple, Development, Technology

4 Responses to “Web Development Environment…Easy as 1-2-3”

  1. Randy Says:
    January 5th, 2006 at 7:28 pm

    For local-machine development on a windows computer, I like XAMPP a lot — it’s simple to use — and if you’re concerned about resources running the env, you can also try XAMPP Lite.

    From their site… “XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.”

    Right now there are XAMPP distributions for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris.

    It’s pretty handy. Check it out:
    http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

  2. Brian Sweeting Says:
    January 6th, 2006 at 6:38 am

    Thanks for pointing out XAMPP. I’ll have to check it out.

  3. Elliot Smith Says:
    March 10th, 2006 at 5:04 am

    Dear Brian,

    You might also be interested to know about ROROX, a Rails stack (with SCGI support) on Linux, on top of an existing XAMPP installation:

    http://rubyforge.org/projects/rorox/

    (I maintain this project)

    I’m also working on another project to build a Lighttpd/FastCGI/SQLite/Rails environment which can be moved around and still work. I intend to install standalone “localhost” Rails apps. on client machines with as little fuss as possible. No releases yet, but there is a project site:

    http://rubyforge.org/projects/sleepr/

    You might also be interested to know that work is underway to move InstantRails to XAMPP, and make it cross-platform.

    Elliot

  4. Dave Says:
    March 15th, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    I use XAMPP and am satisfied almost 100%. But I’m still waitng for the new one coming from Mac.