We do a lot of our development within virtual machines.
So VirtualBox is a great free solution in that area
www.virtualbox.org
and then to make new VM setup and deployment easier we use Vagrant
http://vagrantup.com/

-Joseph
--
Joseph Rhoads
Digital Repository Manager
Brown University Library


On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 2:35 PM, Mita Williams <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> That reminds me of how I got started with Drupal. I was so scared of
> botching up an install on a "server" that I ran XAMPP and ran my first
> Drupal install on a USB key!
>
>
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 2:31 PM, Joe Hourcle
> <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
>
> > On Nov 2, 2012, at 2:09 PM, Mita Williams wrote:
> >
> > > +1 to web-hosting as it gives the ability install one's own software on
> > > one's domain (which feels great) *and* easy access to shell.
> > >
> > > And when web-hosting feels like too much of a barrier to access, sites
> > like
> > > jsfiddle where you can immediately start adding *and* sharing code is
> > key.
> > > IMHO the initial appeal of Code Academy was that it removed all
> barriers
> > to
> > > getting started.  Getting a laptop's localhost set up is too daunting
> > for a
> > > first step, I think.
> >
> > If that's a problem for people, it might be worth looking at the various
> > *AMP (LAMP, WAMP, MAMP) stacks for an easy install of Apache, mySQL +
> perl
> > / python / php.
> >
> > We're probably moving away from locally hosted services towards 'the
> cloud'
> > for the most part (remember when they used to be called 'service
> > providers'?)
> > but it's still useful to learn a little something about configuring a
> > webserver / database / etc.
> >
> > And it's generally more locked down in the various *AMP stacks than if
> > you went and installed them individually, so there aren't quite the
> > same level of problems w/ security.
> >
> > -Joe
> >
>