LAMP, WAMP & MAMP?

March 20, 2008 1:32 PM

What is a good distribution of WAMP? What about LAMP? I'm looking for something that is relatively easy to install and use like MAMP.

I'm going to give a non-technical presentation on the technical topic of how to DIY your own dynamic, web 2.0, collaborative web sites. I'm familiar with hosting on a Mac (that's what I learned everything on) but not on Windows or Linux. This is a presentation for school librarians and I would like to show them what is possible if they learn how to do some of this stuff themselves (creating your own blogs, wikis, CMS, etc... with lots of plugins that do all sorts of stuff).

I'm going to show them what free server side software is available but I also need to give them a quick run down of what they need to build all of this stuff, specifically AMP.

posted by crios to computers & internet (9 comments total)

XAMPP. With downloads for Linux, Windows, OS X, and Solaris.
posted by chrisroberts at 1:37 PM on March 20

I use WOS Portable [Webserver on stick] for this.
posted by ijsbrand at 1:42 PM on March 20

I use WampServer on my Windows laptop, but it's just for screwing around with, not for running actual websites. I would assume it works just fine - i've just never really tried. On any Linux i've used recently (Ubuntu and Fedora Core), the default distribution already came with all the necessary pieces installed, or was easily available in the repository.
posted by cgg at 1:58 PM on March 20

XAMPP ++1
posted by EastCoastBias at 2:05 PM on March 20

I third XAMMP. I use it to teach a server-side computing (PHP, SQL) course.
posted by stungeye at 2:08 PM on March 20

nthed, with a caveat. XAMPP is a mighty good tool for development and testing, but I've heard concerns about using it as an actual webserver (security concerns, IIRC?). I run it off a portable drive for development and testing, though, and it's awesome.
posted by middleclasstool at 2:17 PM on March 20

Yes, potentially catastrophic security concerns, from what I'm reading, and even locking everything down through the XAMPP security console isn't enough. From apachefriends:

The default configuration is not good from a securtiy point of view and it's not secure enough for a production environment - please don't use XAMPP in such environment.

But if you're just talking about development and testing, it's a great tool, even for n00bs.
posted by middleclasstool at 3:01 PM on March 20

I haven't used XAMMP, so it may be better suited to your needs as AppServ does not come with Perl; but I swear by AppServ for testing my web applications on my localhost.
posted by sir_rubixalot at 3:10 PM on March 20

I had problems getting some of XAMPP's features that I needed to go on my setup, so I switched to Apache2Triad, which offers everything (I needed) that XAMPP does, and for me was a bit more flexible.

That said, a quick search on sourceforge will reveal LOTS of them.
posted by ChasFile at 3:49 PM on March 20