PHP 5 - The Easy Way
As you probably know, PHP 5.0 was just released a few days ago. I’ve been keeping an eye on this new PHP release because it looks like the community has made some great improvements. The main things that interest me are a new object-oriented model (it’s about time!), better xml support (again, about time!) and a built-in database program (sqlite). I’ve quite honestly become attached to asp.net, mostly because of it’s completely smooth object-oriented approach to things that lets me separate my code from my html … so hopefully the new version of PHP will make life easier on PHP users. Anyway, if there was ever a time to learn PHP, it’s now.
So, now what? You need to install PHP and mySQL (and maybe Apache too) … but what a pain! Well, the guys over at Wampserver have a solution that will help you get your testing server up and running in no time. It’s called Wampserver and it installs and configures Apache, PHP 5, mySQL, and PHPmyadmin all with one speedy installer! Besides that, it gives you a nifty little tray application to help control and configure all those apps. I had it up and running on my Windows 2000 testing server in about 3 minutes. Thanks Wampserver! Now all I have to do is actually learn PHP 5 :-)