A Complete Cross Platform PHP, JSP and ColdFusion Development Environment on a Stick.
AKA
CF(Absolutely)Anywhere
or
PHP(Absolutely)Anywhere
I have been messing around with making Live Demo Disks for almost a year now. I have tried a whole slew of web/database/application servers and apps that ran off a CD or a Thumb Drive (Stick) and found some that were excellent and some that were, frankly, held together by the digital version of duct tape. Not that there is anything wrong with digital duct tape, we use it all the time. :)
Well, after a lot of trial and error I have come up with (what I believe to be) the best portable development and Live Demo environment around (For PHP, ColdFusion and MySQL that is) .
Pretty bold statement, huh?
Well, this offers a complete self-contained development environment for *AMPE Apache/MySQL/PHP/Eclipse and ACME (Apache/ColdFusion/MySQL/Eclipse). It will run on Windows, Mac AND Linux (Except for MyManager, which is nice, but optional).
Right now I cannot run both CF and PHP on the same web server but it is close enough. I am sure it can be done but I don’t feel like it at the moment. Feel free to take the ball and run with it though.
Here goes:
XAMPP or XAMPP Lite:
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html
http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-windows.html#646
XAMPP Lite provides you with every thing to run a bare bones *AMP stack. It even comes with phpMyAdmin so you can manage MySQL with out needing a desktop app.
XAMPP Lite is a very reduced version of XAMPP with:
Apache 2.2.4
PHP 5.2.1
MySQL 5.0.33
phpMyAdmin 2.9.2
Openssl 0.9.8d
SQLite 2.8.15.
Railo:
http://www.railo.ch/en/index.cfm?treeID=200Railix (Live Version) is a self contained CF engine that, unlike CFEverywhere, runs right out of the box. Unzip it and run the start.bat (on Linux run start.sh) and it is up and running. You can change the port to 80 by editing the server.xml file. What I like most about it is that the Linux and Windows versions comes preloaded with a version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) so you don’t have to worry if it is installed on the machine you are using (Do Macs come preloaded with the JRE?). You can even use the JRE to run Eclipse or other Java apps.
Eclipse:
http://www.eclipse.org/http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
Eclipse is an AWESOME IDE and it runs on all the popular OS’s and comes with plug-ins for every language imaginable. All you need for this to run is the JRE. If you do not have the JRE installed on your system you will need to copy the JRE folder from Railo to your Eclipse folder. I am not sure how it works for non-Windows systems, as I don’t have the time to get involved with that at this juncture.
I use the Pre-built PHP IDE (I never had luck installing all the Required prerequisites)
and CFEclipse with the RDS plug-ins from Adobe (See my previous Blog entry on how to install CFEclipse and the RDS plug-ins).
EMS SQL Manager 2005 Lite for MySQL.
http://www.sqlmanager.net/en/products/mysql/managerMyManager Lite is a great little tool (windows only) for managing SQL databases. The stand alone version does not need to be installed. Just unzip and run.
EMS makes a great product and has a whole line of great DBMS tools (including a lot of free (lite) versions) for
MySQL,
SQL Server,
PostgreSQL,
Oracle, DB2 etc....
So ther you have it . I have a USB stick that I can plug into any computer, be it Mac, Windows or Linux and I can write, run and test applications written using PHP, ColdFusion and JSP. It truly is a complete cross platform web development environment for most of the languages I use.
I am sure that someone will flame me for some unfathomable reason.
That is killer!!! It runs on both my Ubuntu and Windows machines. Good job!!
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