Ye' old general discussion board. Basically, for everything that isn't covered elsewhere. Come here to shoot the breeze, shoot your mouth off, or whatever suits your fancy. This forum is not for asking programming related questions.
I am kinda new to all this server side script and things.. I wonder how could I set up myself a home server for testing my scripts on without having to put them on the real server via ftp.. wich is a pain in the arse with 56K anyways, someone could help me ? What do I need.. do I need an ultra super performance PC with 10 gb ram and double xeon or just a plain nice and cool P3 could do the job well.. It's only light script like jpeg hanldling.. hm.. email sending, very little calculations.. etc! So.. help me up guys please !!
something I would suggest is this program: AppServ. You simply install it and then your computer is basically a workstation/server. This can be cahnged and people here can help you adjust that its very simple.
Anyway it installs several programs all in one go. One is Apache so you can type localhost in internet explorer and you can see your test server. The other things are PHP and mysql.
The program is very simple and it automatically gives itself a basic configuration so it pretty much works out of the box without any extra configuration.
IT IS FREE!!! Thought I would add that since its always great to find out :p
Or... Install it yourself! At some point, you're probably going to want to do that. Offers the most flexibility.
It can be a pain getting it to work the first time, though, so the bundled installation kits are good for first-timers. It took me forever to get MySQL working on my computer.
Make sure that if this is only a testing server you have a router or firewall blocking incoming port 80 connections.
At some point you will need to mess around with linux since that's the most common web-serving environment. Mandrake is a good option if you haven't used linux before.