In this post, I’d like to do two things. First off, I want to plug a really cool site called PortableApps.com that has some really cool software in the form of … well, portable apps. What these are, are common widely used applications that have been transformed in such a way that they can run right off of your thumb drive, no install necessary, hence the term portable. They have lots of cool stuff that you can download, absolutely free, and use right off your thumb drive, or hard drive, or anywhere really. It’s nice being able to have firefox and open office (and much more) with you, no matter where you go, even with all of your own settings and customizations. That’s hard to beat! Go check it out, you won’t be disappointed I am sure.
OK, having talked about the site in general, let me showcase one really cool thing that they have there called XAMPP. Now, the folks at PortableApps didn’t create XAMPP, they just have it there for download and inclusion into their application suite. The main page for XAMPP is here, but I have been using the one from PortableApps since I use their other stuff anyway, it’s real handy.
Now, what is XAMPP you are asking yourself. It’s only a PHP/MySQL developers best friend. XAMPP is a set of files that is an entire development environment or stack, all in one handy little package. No installing is needed, no compiling or tweaking, nothing. You just unpack it all and go, it has a nice control panel to stop and start Apache, MySQL and more. The latest release includes the following major components:
- Apache HTTPD 2.2.8 + Openssl 0.9.8g
- MySQL 5.0.51a
- PHP 5.2.5
- PHP 4.4.8
- phpMyAdmin 2.11.4
- FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.25
- Mercury Mail Transport System 4.52
Wow, that rocks my friends. That is everything you need to crank up and geek out, coding like a monkey all night long. You can download this for Windows and get coding even when your Linux box isn’t handy. I have played with it and have found it darn near invaluable. For anyone that already codes, or just wants to play around with it I highly recommend checking this out, as well as all of the portable apps. Enjoy!