Most web sites are hosted on Unix servers. Most developers use Windows.

They are bold statements to make and I have no statistics to back them up. Nevertheless I believe them to be true.

I am pretty sure that most web servers run on a Unix platform. What the breakdown of that is I have no idea, but Linux is certainly very popular in the web hosting world. There are Windows hosts running IIS. How many? I don’t know. But whereever you look you find a LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP – installation.

What about the statement that most developers use Windows? I base that on the fact that Windows have the largest desktop market share. Sure, a lot of web developers use Macintosh. For some it is because of their graphic design background, for others it is because they realise that for designing webs the Mac is a superior platform, or so they say. And some people, actually quite a lot, I think, develop on some species of Unix, again often Linux. I know this because they mention it in forums and other places.

However, I still think I come across more people developing in Windows than any other platform.

I develop in Windows. Not because I think it is better, but because I also write programs and most of my clients use Windows, and I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot by not having the right platform to develop the applications that they want.

But the problem arises when you want to test your LAMP web site on a Windows machine. If the web host ran IIS on its server you have no problem. I have IIS on my XP. But my hosting company runs Apache on Linux with a MySQL database and Perl and PHP installed. The same as most hosting companies do.

You can set up Apache to run in Windows. The same for MySQL, PHP and Perl. But they are pigs of things to set up and configure properly. Don’t get me wrong, it can be done and has been done by thousands of satisfied web developers.

But you needn’t go to all that trouble. There are a few products which make the set up a breeze. You can find some at SourceForge and there is another called XAMP which might be worth a look.

I use a product called WAMPServer which you can get from the SourceForge site. I didn’t get it because it was the best, it was just the first one that I came across some time ago. But I have heard good things about XAMP, the choice is yours. WAMPServer didn’t install Perl, but I rarely use it and I installed it separately myself.

There is nothing magical about any of these products but they are free, easy to use, setup and configure and they certainly make setting up a local web server a breeze.