I have a voice

As I’m a bit geeky I try a lot of different software, pretty much whatever interests me. In researching an unrelated problem I ran into Xampp and had to give it a try. It’s brilliant. Okay, it’s brilliant for geeks like me who have a tendency to laziness. Let me explain.

Because I program, I’m always writing something that needs tested. Often it involves database access and more than one program that normally could not be tested on my local machine. Testing scrips locally on my modest Windows desktop is doable, but getting all the necessary software installed and working together is a true nightmare, the kind with big fanged winged creatures hunting for blood and definitely not for the faint of heart. Because I rebuild my machine about once a year, and because I’m basically lazy, I did the setup and got it working semi-properly once. Apparently that was enough for me and I never attempted it again. Ya just gotta love Microsoft .

So along comes Xampp. In the time it took to download, unzip and install Xampp I had a working local server with php and MySQL. Less than 15 minutes. No kidding! It took longer to compose this post than it took to get Xampp up and running. No fighting with Microsoft install software and procedures, no arduous steps to get the Microsoft IIS server running, no individually installing php and mysql, no fighting with IIS to get these services talking to each other and running on the IIS server. Download, unzip, run the install file and it’s done. Voila!

Apparently someone more ambitious and geeky than I saw the same shark infested waters and wrote an installer to handle the Microsoft server integration problem. Now local testing is a snap. Even someone ungeeky could benefit from Xampp.

I don’t know if this is an “all things come to she who waits” or just serendipitous fortune. Whichever, picture me smiling.