Installing PHP on Windows
By Michael J. Ross2008-03-05
XAMPP
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For some developers — especially those with limited experience using these technologies — installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and getting all of them to work together, can prove daunting. This tutorial, in conjunction with the other two, should alleviate much if not all of a beginner's anxiety. Nonetheless, someone may still have problems getting everything working properly, or may simply want to install everything at once, to save time.
Intended to meet this need, XAMPP combines Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl, already bundled together, and working together. Like all of its individual components, XAMPP is free and open-source. It is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris.
This is one of several bundled packages available, most of which offer some sort of control panel which allows you to stop and restart the individual components, and to administer them if needed. This can save you time and frustration getting started. On the other hand, they typically are not set up for maximum security, and veteran developers oftentimes do not care for the preset choices.
Regardless of whether you install PHP individually or as part of a package, you will no doubt find that it is an extremely capable language — particularly for creating Web-based applications and sites that need to change dynamically and communicate with database systems such as MySQL.
Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» PHP Already Installed?
» Downloading PHP
» Testing PHP
» Adding MySQL
» MySQL Versions of DLLs
» XAMPP
