Many developers prefer to have a WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) environment due to the obiquitous nature of Windows platform. A number of ready-made packages are available that can be used to dump a working PHP development environment on Windows environment with a few clicks. The major ones are phpdev and XAMPP, etc.. However, any hardcore PHP programmer would like to setup his/her development environment from scratch with the individual latest releases of PHP, MySQL and Apache for flexibility and scalability.
