Setting Up a Local Development Environment in Windows

People Online’s internship program successfully launched today. One thing I was completely unprepared for was having to do a basic primer on development environments. Lots of smarts and potential, but whoa! Pirated software out the wazoo, and a general lack of knowledge of where to find information. Here’s a quick list I put together for our interns.

WAMP stack (Windows + Apache + MySQL + PHP). Many of our interns use EasyPHP. I prefer XAMPP because it’s powerful, and most importantly, installs on a USB Key. XAMPP also comes in a Lite version that doesn’t include a lot of XAMPP’s features. It’s smaller and uses much less memory than it’s fully featured counterpart.

Bonus: XAMPP runs as a portable app.

Text editor. Yes, your pirated copy of DreamWeaver is very nice, but NotePad++ also comes in French and has a large plugin library. If you want a full-fledged development environment, download Eclipse and the PHP extension. If you absolutely must have a WYSIWYG development environment, check out NVU.

Bonus: Notepad++ and NVU run as a portable apps.

Image editor. Oh, look, another pirated copy of PhotoShop! The only feature that the GIMP lacks is the ability to organize layers into folders. If you don’t need or use that in PhotoShop, the relatively lightweight GIMP is a free and open source alternative.

Bonus: The GIMP runs as a portable app.

Browsers. Up-to-date versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari are an absolute minimum for testing. If you’re running Vista, you can use IETester to check your website in older versions of IE. It’s crash-prone, but it’s worth the frustration to know that everything is at least professional looking in IE6, even if not pixel perfect.

Bonus: Firefox, Opera, and Chrome all run as portable apps.

FTP. Filezilla is the gold standard for free FTP programs.

Bonus: Filezilla runs as a portable app.

References. No connection? No excuses. Lots of reference materials are free and available for download. The w3c publishes the xHTML, HTML, and CSS standards as downloadable ZIP archives and PDFs. The MySQL reference is available in many languages and formats, as is all of php.net, including a function reference and example code. Also useful are the Apache Desktop Reference and the Ubuntu Pocket Guide.

This list is quite incomplete, but it’s enough to at least get started developing in a local environment. Are there any glaring omissions? What tools do you use for local web development? What other good reference materials are available for free online?