EasyPHP: Everything You Need for a Fully Functional PHP Site in One Small Package
EasyPHP really is as easy as its name implies. If you’re a PHP developer, you probably don’t mind getting your hands dirty. But why go through the hassle when EasyPHP does it for you?
I’ll provide a real-life example. I’m a dabbler in PHP, not an expert by any means. While I can code my way around PHP and MySQL without too much trouble, but the same doesn’t go for FreeBSD, which was what our test server was running at the office. Instead of playing with that and banging my head against the wall several times, I thought I’d try EasyPHP and see if it was really as easy as it claimed to be.
I downloaded and installed EasyPHP 5.3.1, started EasyPHP, (Apache, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin,) and saved a test page called index.php in the default directory, (www under the EasyPHP installation directory.) All I had to do was select “Local Web” from the EasyPHP menu, and up popped my test page. The whole process, from downloading the software to when my test page appeared on the screen, took less than five minutes. You can’t ask for much more from a package like this.
The problem came when I tried to use PHPMyAdmin to import a database. When I selected the Configuration>PHPMyAdmin option from EasyPHP’s menu, I received a blank page. I poked around to make sure the configuration looked correct, then decided to look on the forums for any possible hints. It turns out that many people are experiencing this problem with EasyPHP 5.3.1. There didn’t seem to be any EasyPHP folks on the forum, so there was no definitive answer to the question of why it wasn’t working. In the end, I downgraded back to EasyPHP 5.2.10, and things worked as they should. I was able to easily import the database.
All in all, EasyPHP is an easy, no-frills server environment for PHP developers who prefer to use Windows to write and test their code, but it does come with a few caveats:
- It’s obviously not made for a production environment, only for local testing.
- The help is virtually nonexistent.
- If you have problems, the forums aren’t necessarily the most helpful.
That said, however, EasyPHP 5.2.10 is still the slickest, easiest way to code PHP on a Windows machine.
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