I asked a friend of mine, who has lots of experience with Apache, etc. what he thought of XAMPP before I install it. This is what he said:
"Never used XAMPP, so I cannot tell you anything about it. I would
stick to Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL as standalone applications
without using addon apps.
Perl is not PHP and PHP is not Perl. Let's put it this way: Perl can
be used for web apps, but it's mostly used as a system application
while PHP is web only.
Probably your best solution is to install VMWARE and create a virtual
machine that runs KUBUNTU (http://kubuntu.org/)
You can run Apache very well with windows, mac, unix, linux, etc.
without "easy stuff" like XAMPP. I strongly suggest you to use Apache
as it is, without addon stuff, especially if you will end-up
publishing the site to a server that runs native Apache. PHP global
variables are properly read only by Apache, so you will end-up with
all kinds of errors if you develop into an environment that is a lot
different than what your ISP provides."
Is this true? Do any of you have problems with bugs on Native Apache hosts after development in ASMPP?