amp.jpgFor those of you who want to get into Apache,MySQL & PHP/PERL (AMP) and don’t have the knowledge or resources to setup a dedicated Linux box to play around with AMP, I suggest downloading WebServ (DOWNLOAD) which is a pre-packaged setup that installs the following:

  • Apache 2.0.55 which is the latest pre-compiled Binary version of Apache2 for the Win32 platform.
  • MySQL 4.x (I suggest not installing this part and getting MySQL 5.0.19 or greater directly from MySQL.com)
  • PHP 5.1.1, latest series of PHP.
  • ActivePerl – Don’t know/care too much about this part of it.

Over the past few days I have been working on learning PHP to convert my websites over from ASP to PHP so I can finally kiss Windoze/IIS goodbye for my own sites. So far, it has gone pretty smoothly. Both PHP and ASP have the same basic structure, although a lot of the functions vary a bit, but once you figure everything out, it’s great!

Apache is also much more responsive than ASP when it comes to heavily database driven pages. Under IIS, it just loaded at average speed, even on my local network, but now Apache/PHP is amazingly responsive… As if it is a static HTML page loading. I’m very satisfied so far.

Overall, I’ll probably still continue to do some things in ASP due to the years of experience I have with it, but I am going to limit it to only a few clients.

Here is a good ASP/PHP cross reference guide comparing the major functions side by side. It has been pretty helpful for me this past week.

Email me if you have any questions about this package and I’ll see what I can do to help.