Rory Hansen

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It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done any web development in my free time– at least, any non-work related web development. Well, after batting around a few business ideas with buddies these past couple weeks, I’ve enough motivation to actually go ahead and see what happens with one (or two or three) of them.  But first, I need to prepare my development environment.

My aging laptop has been by my side throughout university and the first few years of post-university employment, and, well, has seen me use a myraid of tools for the many different development phases of my life. Lots of these tools have since aged into obsoleteness, so the first phase of my development environment preparation saw me ridding my harddrive of many of these tools and/or turning off services that are no longer used. Gone is Eclipse, as well as Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and that old version of MySQL. Cya later Ruby and Python. IIS? Disabled.

I’ve decided to use Code Igniter as my web application framework for these ideas I’m going to pursue. If you don’t already know, it’s a “powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint, built for PHP coders who need a simple and elegant toolkit to create full-featured web applications”, or so it’s website says at least. As such, after cleansing my laptop, I installed the newest versions of Apache, PHP, and MySQL. (Truth be told, I was surprised at the relative ease at which they were installed. No configuration mess at all, although I’ll probably have to do a httpd.conf refresher in a few days.)

Has anyone ever used one of those pre-configured WAMP installation packages, such as WAMP5 at WAMPServer.com? What are your thoughts? Worth using? At first, I was tempted to use one of these packages, rather than installing each of the tools separately, but decided that I wanted the freedom to upgrade whenver, rather than when the WAMP5 distributable was updated.

Anyway, my laptop is now almost all set to go! All that’s left is to set up some virtual directories, install Code Igniter, and then refamiliarize myself with PHP. Wish me luck!