14 DAY TRIAL // Currently, there are many free distributions of web development related software that provides various types of server side programming languages and other applications, such as servers, web traffic analysis applications, database management tools and more. Regarding the web server configuration, a few free software distributions allow the server management actions to be performed in a visual manner using a graphical user interface.
WampServer is a distribution of Apache, PHP and MySQL that is available only for Windows platform. It comes bundled with the latest versions of Apache web server, PHP (a server side programming language) and MySQL (a relational database). It is suited for beginner (as well as advanced) webmasters due to the fact that the server or PHP settings can be specified in a visual manner using a GUI. As a consequence, you will not have to manually edit the configuration files.
The installation is automatically performed by an installer. Another interesting feature is represented by the possibility to switch between different installed versions of Apache, PHP and MySQL only with a few mouse clicks. In this way, you will be able to clone various types of production web servers, because each Apache, PHP and MySQL version will have different configuration files. You can also host your website on the Apache webserver. WampServer provides you the option to allow a global (server online) or local access (server offline) to the web server.
PHP settings and extensions can be managed using the appropriate menu in the WampServer GUI. The default website at http://localhost is shown in the screenshot. If you want to test PHP scripts or applications, you must copy them inside the directory c:\wamp\www (if c:\wamp is your WampServer installation directory) and specify the address based on their path. For example if you have a script called index.php and you have putted in the directory c:\wamp\www\test, in order to call it, you must type in the browser address bar http://localhost/test/index.php . WampServer includes also database management tools for MySQL (phpMyAdmin) and SQLite (SQLiteManager). The access to server logs and MySQL console is instant.
From my point of view, WampServer is a very useful tool, especially when you want to test your scripts behavior with different PHP versions and server configurations, because you are able to specify the desired testing parameters only in a few seconds.