Web Dev Without the Web: Or how to create your own local server for building and testing websites.

XAMPP - Rocks!

The nice guys over at Apache Friends have made it easy to get your own webserver up in no time! Just goto http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and grab the file you need for your type of computer (Windows, Linux, or even Mac) and run 1 application that fires up a real Perl/PHP environment,MySQL Database, and Apache HTTP daemon ALL IN ONE!

Requirements and features

XAMPP requires only one exe file to be downloaded and run, and little or no configuration of the various components that make up the web server is required. XAMPP is regularly updated to incorporate the latest releases of Apache/MySQL/PHPand Perl. It also comes with a number of other modules including OpenSSL and phpMyAdmin.

Installing XAMPP takes less time than installing each of its components separately. Self-contained, multiple instances of XAMPP can exist on a single computer, and any given instance can be copied from one computer to another.

It is offered in both a full, standard version and a smaller version (known as XAMPP Lite). Add-on extension modules also are available for free.

What’s it for?

Officially, XAMPP’s designers intended it for use only as a development tool, to allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers without any access to the Internet. To make this as easy as possible, many important security features are disabled by default. In practice, however, XAMPP is sometimes used to actually serve web pages on the web. A special tool is provided to password-protect the most important parts of the package.

XAMPP also provides support for creating and editing databases in MySQL and SQLite among others.

GRAB IT HERE:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/xampp/

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1. Notepad++
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Ok If you haven’t heard, Notepad++ is basically the end-all editor for writing code, FAST.While it’s not a true IDE for writing full scale applications like Java’s NETBeans, Visual Studio, Dreamweaver, etc., it’s makes life so much easier for those of us who only need to do editing, quick code-revision, editing, and even as just a syntax highlighter.

It Supports all these computer languages:

It also supports FTP, Themes, Macros, and a LOT more!! When Installing it even asks if you want to install it to a Thumb drive to make it portable!!

Clone Mode, for example lets you open the SAME document twice, so you can edit the Top of a file on the left pane, and the bottom on the right pane, and what changes in one pane, also changes in the other. I know of NO OTHER EDITING APPLICATION that does this! (See Screenshot)

Multi View Clone Mode

Well go give it a try, it even comes with Themes you should check out too, that change the colors of the Syntax highlighting to make it look like anything from a Green screen terminal to a neon or neo gothic l33t script editor.

It’s great for those tweaks to your website here and there, I mean, I have used it ALOT on this very site!

Download it here: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

And some juicy Screenshots!:

Jason's Notepad++

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