XAMPP rubs me the right way
Portable web servers have been around for years. And since installing Apache on Windows hasn’t always been a smooth procedure, many developers have tried to find ways to setup Apache for Windows in a self-contained environment, one could port into any windows system and use as a sandbox for his/her projects.
I personally was stuck with an old installation of phpdev for some time but I felt bad using it as it seemed too quirky and uncontrollable.
Then I used a Linux virtual machine, an Ubuntu installation with the popular LAMP setup being a breeze to install, but that dragged my system resources and I always got annoyed by the latency.
Recently I rediscovered XAMPP – I knew it as part of the portable apps line-up but never really got my hands dirty with it. I suppose it wasn’t as fine polished then to notice…
Visit the homepage: http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
If server management isn’t your thing but you like server-side (~PHP) programming, this is the tool for you. You can really work like on a proper server with PHP, MySQL installed and experiment with your web applications. Run your code, create databases… Crash everything, burn it to the ground and simply delete the server folder and start all over again 
It also has some extra features, a FileZilla FTP server and a Mercury mail transport system for whoever wants to make use of those kinds of services. I remind you that we are talking about portable software – that means all this can run from a folder on your computer with no installation. It looks like a regular program, it runs like a regular program but it acts like a server. Great!
Of course XAMPP isn’t without competition. Other alternatives you might want to look at are:
Wamp, Server2Go and Sambar. To be honest I haven’t gone as far as testing those so I can’t elaborate on their features.
XAMPP is so lightweight and well-featured I don’t even consider an alternative at the moment.
