TechIntersect

Wampserver is cool program i discovered this summer when i needed to install an Apache webserver with PHP and a MySQL database on my Windows XP based laptop. WAMP stands for Windows Apache MySQl PHP.

In the networking class I teach, one of the labs we always do is to download and install Apache. This year, I might have them use WampServer instead because it is just as simple to download and install, and you get so much more than basic Apache. (Apache is the popular free web server program that will run on just about any computing platform you can think of. Whether it is Linux, Windows , Macintosh or whatever, Apache will probably run on it. You can download a simple Apache webserver here.)

Webservers

When you download a web page from the web using your browser, the web server is the machine running the server software that your browser communicates with. For example, your browser is currently talking with the webserver located at edublogs.org. Students who want to learn web development and web programming skills often find it is easier to learn with a copy of the web serving software installed locally, rather than on some machine out on the Internet. This allows students to develop web pages and view them through an actual web server without needing to have online hosting. You can even develop entire websites without internet access, which is why I wanted it on my laptop. I was travelling without internet access but still wanted to work on my web project.

PHP and MySQL

If you are only making static webpages without dynamic content, you don’t really need a locally installed webserver, you can just view your HTML in a browser. However, if you wish to write server-side PHP scripts with MySQL database connectivity, you need access to a server running these technologies. You can find hosting that will provide this, usually for a fee, but if you are running Windows and just learning, WampServer is the way to go. (I see there’s a similar tool called MAMP for Macintosh, but I haven’t tried that one yet.) If you are a Linux fan, you will probably find that LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL & PHP) is the way to go, but that is another future post all by itself.

PHP is a simple programming/scripting language that allows web pages to have dynamic, always changing content. A widget or plugin on a blog is an example of dynamic content on a web page. These are automatically updated with external data, which is not possible on a static, unchanging HTML page.

MySQL is a relational database management program. It works particularly well with the Apache webserver and is often used for storing database data that will be used by websites. MS Access is an example of a commercial database that many people are familiar with, and was one of the first databases that I ever worked with. What I learned with Access translated well to what I needed to know to use MySQL.

The best part about all of these tools is that they are free! Open source software is very powerful, and available to even the smallest of budgets. Tutorials for using these technologies are all over the internet. Download a copy of WAMP or MAMP and get started learning some great web development technologies!

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