I got the itch recently to do some PHP developing for some photo site needs I have. Opted to try my hand with AJAX and jQuery libs while I was at it. I also wanted to use an IDE of some form, and found PHPDesigner to be a nice one. My problem is that I live in Windows these days, even though I have a hosted server running Linux. VIM is fine for quick bug fixes and changes, but this was ground-up work and not my specialty. I could have used WAMP or even cygwin, but each seems like so much work. Having played around in VMWare recently, I decided to just install Ubuntu and see if I could use that. Still had the problem of it being “remote” however. In comes the features of VMWare with it’s shared folders. The HGFS modules compiled fine in Ubuntu. I created my project files and shared them with Ubuntu. Then configured Apache inside the VM to use that share as the docroot. This way, any changes I made to the project, were already in place on the server, which is very similar to that of my hosted server.

I just feel so much more comfortable using Linux for hosted needs and using Windows as desktop needs. Silly that way I guess.