If you have found yourself going through vast amounts of PHP applications, trying to find the right one, you may have used their online demo’s and other similar resources. Unfortunately a lot of these have their limitations, and one thing you can’t do is the installation itself or test how it runs on different systems. One thing i have found recently to help hugely with this is Wampserver. It is essentially a completely bundled installation of Apache, MySQL, and PHP and after installation it will run right out of the box. As with many things i assumed i would configuring it for a while to get various things working but this was not at all necessary – i was up and testing PHP apps within 10 minutes of downloading the Wampserver install. 
But what happens if you’ve finished testing your PHP applications, no longer need it running, but don’t want to remove it? As with many aspects of it, that has already been thought of and they provide you with a handy batch file that will stop all services and prevent them from starting so the install lays dormant until it needs to be used again.
At the time of writing it comes bundled with Apache 2.2.11, MySQL 5.1.36, and PHP 5.3.0 so is kept well updated – but you can even upgrade/downgrade any of the individual components if needed to enable you to run older applications or have a specific environment for testing. Obviously it hasn’t been produced with a live environment in mind, but should you wish to host your own small website from home this is a perfect solution and means that even if your PC blows up you can quickly re-install and restore your data to it’s previous glory with very little configuration!
This app is definately worth a look, and well worth writing about.
