Introduction to LAMP & PHP

Alternatives available on Windows

If you are familiar with windows or want to develop your website on Windows then move it to Linux based Host server. Then there are multiple windows equivalent of the LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux (Operating System), Apache (Web Server), Mysql (Database), and PHP (Scripting Language). Under these alternatives, instead of using Linux as the Operating System, you use one of the Microsoft Windows OSes such as XP, 2000 or 2k3.

Why use Windows instead of Linux

Windows OSes since 2000 i.e. 2k, XP , 2k3 have been extremely stable as opposed to their predecessors. So if you are proficient in Windows, then there is no reason not to use it for web hosting. (barring security, but that's another issue).

Secondly if you want to develop your site off line and then move it to a LAMP Stack, and you are not familiar with Linux, then these Windows based alternatives serves as an ideal prototyping environment.

You can do almost every thing with them that you can do in LAMP, furthermore they are extremely easy to install, configure, administer and use. Since with these windows alternatives comes as a single bundle (Apache+PHP+MySQL), you don't need to download and install them separately. Just install and you are ready to go.

Given below are some alternatives available for LAMP stack on Windows:

1. XAMPP [www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.php]

2. WAMP server [www.en.wampserver.com/download.php]

3. Easy PHP [http://downloads.sourceforge.net/quickeasyphp/EasyPHP-2.0b1- setup.exe?modtime=1166851545&big_mirror=0]

4. PHPTriad [http://downloads.sourceforge.net/phptriad/phptriad2-2- 1.exe?modtime=1013817600&big_mirror=0]