Development Web Servers: Moving From VertrigoServ To WampServer

Written by John Raul II at 6:20 am under Web Development | 128 views

I’ve waited far too long for VertrigoServ developers to come up with a stable Windows Vista version of their popular web server software. It is because their current version as of this writing (version 2.21) causes random blue screen of the death on my Windows Vista system, and after doing some search online, this is issue is known and the moderators of their official forum advised us to wait. However, too bad, my patience has run out and I have work so I can’t wait. I needed to have a working web server on my computer so I found out that WampServer is a free, good web server alternative that runs with stability on Windows Vista. The other good alternative is XAMMP. Although I noticed that some configuration are different and in many ways VertrigoServ is the best, moving from WampServer — and it turned out to be a good decision.

WampServer Menu

The WampServer version that I downloaded and installed on my Windows Vista is version 2.0.x and so far, the experience is good — no freezes, no blue screen of deaths, no problems. I just needed to configure the modules to match my remote web server environment and with WampServer, that is far very easy to do. I only need to left-click the small icon on my system tray then a menu appears and from there you can check and uncheck the modules you want to run for Apache, extensions for PHP and all other things. Vertrigo’s configuration window are easier for beginners though.

WampServer installation includes the following vital web server components and their corresponding versions:

Apache 2.2.8
MySQL 5.0.51b
PHP 5.2.6
PHPMyAdmin
SQLiteManager

Plus, you can install add-ons and independent versions of Apache and PHP other than the default for flexibility. WampServer comes also in French version which is good for French web developers and programmers. If you want to know how to install it, there’s a quick guide on its official homepage.

The only minor issue I had with WampServer is when I decide to change the port of Apache to 8080 making it "localhost:8080" on my web browser. The problem is when I changed Apache’s configuration file to run on that port other than the default port 80, the three menu items on the system tray "PHPMyAdmin, Localhost and SQLiteManager" are not pointing to 8080 (they remain under port 80 and that is a little problem here). I hope the developers of WampServer are going to fix this as I have started to love this software. It’s running on my system as I write this.