It is also the acronym for the stack of software that WordPress runs on where the W is for Windows not WordPress. Windows
Apache
MySQL
PHP

Wow, there are a lot of ways to install it.

WAMP is the awkward cousin of LAMP where the L is for Linux.

LAMP is what much of the web is built on, and the acronym is all to familiar to a web developer’s ear. There are other popular web “stacks”, but WordPress was written in PHP using this stack because it is ubiquitous/everywhere/available on every host.

PHP isn’t a sexy programming language like Python, Ruby, or for the Microserfs .NET, but the WordPress developers have always put first what is most important: everyone being able to use WordPress, and a 5 minute install helps, a lot.

I always recommend developing in an environment as close to what your customers are using , or in the case of a web service the environment that the service will run on.

WordPress is run on a lot of LAMP like environment where the most common variations are, of course, different versions of the software. In putting the WordPress members first, WordPress developers have stayed unsexy by supporting older versions of MySQL and PHP.

Next to running on older versions, the most common variation is using litehttpd, Windows’ IIS, or LiteSpeed Web Server. Solaris for the OS seems to be an increasingly popular choice for web servers.

Environment specific bugs with WordPress are very rare, but when they do occur they have seemed to be PHP version related, or Windows IIS specific. We are very fortunate to have participants like Robert Deaton with the expertise to work around PHP related issues. We are fortunate to have contributors like “Computer Guru” of NeoSmart Technologies and Bas Bosman (nazgul) reporting all problems they find with WordPress on Windows IIS.

So there I was setting up a development environment on Windows because my Ubuntu Linux was laptop temporarily out of commission. The first part of this is installing WAMP.

There are a huge number of popular WAMP packages. Wikipedia (encyclopedia++) has a comparison page of WAMPs. Any of the popular ones that have been updated in the last six months would probably be a good choice.

When I have a choice where there seems to be no difference in functionality, I choose based on which one appears to have the strongest community or is better produced and supported. Which of those two depends on whether I’m looking for community and free, or produced and paid support. With community and free, I’m ultimately taking the risk that I will be by myself in investigating any problems.

Here community and free are a good choice, because I’m not going to need a more advanced WAMP stack with monitoring (now).

There are a huge number of popular choices, but the most popular based on reading blog posts and forums seem to be XAMPP and WAMP (now called WAMPServer). I’m surprised by how much more popular XAMPP is given that WAMP has the generic name. XAMPP seems to have few Google Search results related to “security exploit”, so the popularity isn’t likely negative because of bad security.

So that is the long story of me choosing to install XAMPP on Windows Vista.

I will probably follow up with some of my notes from installing it, but for now I leave you with my colleague Mark Riley’s still excellent Installing Xampp and WordPress or John Godley’s Installing WordPress on your own Windows computer. After you are setup on Windows (if you must) see Peter Westwood (westi)’s Windows WordPress Toolbox.

Update Sept 19th: Chris Kasten (handysolo) is writing a great series of posts the first one being Testing New WordPress Versions Part 1: XAMPP