WAMP Packages
Availability of WAMP packages is not a new story, they are here since the beginning of last decade now. EasyPHP, Wamp, XAMPP and dozens of them. Find comparison of WAMP packages on Wikipedia here.
We are here not to discuss all of them, just top 3 to 5 which are active and we can use them reliably for development or optionally for production purpose or both.
Having WAMP stake up-to-date on production environment is important as we are using open-source technologies and there are few to hundreds of critical to non-critical bugs are being fixed with every new release of the software, and if it's development environment we would like to test new features when they're hot.!
Zend Server, Zend Server Cluster Manager and Zend Server Community Edition:
Zend Server (CE)
All 3 editions are highly reliable and ready for production usage. I have tried both Zend Server and ZS-Community Edition, Zend Server - Commercial version is pre-tweaked for performance on production environment and Community Edition do not have some of the goodies. But that does not stop you or me from using Zend Server - CE on production. Zend Server comes with beautiful web-panel to administer, control and configure server from the browser itself. We can change PHP and Apache parameters, check server status and even restart service from within browser itself, this feature makes it good choice for remote server administration.
Zend Server - CE is as good for development as it is for production. It comes as Apache and PHP package where MySQL is an optional download during the installation wizard.
The Uniform Server:
The Uniform Server
Uniform Server is comparatively new kid on the floor and highly configurable for both development and production use. It comes with system tray using which we can switch Apache and PHP configuration files from development to production or back and forth.
It comes in both VC6 and VC9 binaries for Windows and I must say it's most up-to-date WAMP package so far (I mean next or equal to Zend). Rest of all WAMP packages take week to months to bundle latest version of Apache, PHP or MySQL but I have observed Uniform Server very quick with that. This is main benefit if you are really looking for such option to use on production server.
Installation is simplest - extract and done. Comes with minimum, no big bucket (just 11-13MB in size).
Comes with some handy plug-ins for FTP, Resin, Tomcat etc. It has e-Accelerator packed with it is recommended for production use.
