I finally tried Zend Server Community Edition as a replacement of WampServer (or XAMPP) for local development.

While Zend Server proposes to be the perfect solution for any environment, I specifically tried it as a development stack on Windows machines. The use and usefulness of course completely differ in any other scenario.

First of all (and of great importance if you ask me): it is clean, simple and easy to use from A to Z. The installer provides the right options but not too many, the dashboard (control panel) is slick and provides quick access to settings you don’t often find in any other “server packages” and last but not least it performs much better due to the use of FastCGI on Windows.

2 less-frequently used features I missed though:

• A way to set up VirtualHosts in the dashboard.
• A WampServer-like way to switch between PHP (and in a lesser extend Apache) versions.

In total, the fine packaging almost got me convinced to replace WampServer.

Almost… because the choice for FastCGI on Windows also has one major disadvantage: you cannot use php_value settings inside your Apache/VirtualHost configuration. I especially like this since it avoids setting include_path, display_errors, upload_max_filesize and the like inside your scripts or .htaccess (which in some setups causes it to be parsed at every request).
Doing this in Zend Server on another platform isn’t a problem, since they use the PHP Apache module instead of CGI but that means you do not have similar environments and that is the complete opposite of what we want.

So it ended with a deinstallation. On the other hand: I can really see the benefit of this package for live/production environments. With it’s included optimization tools it takes a lot of configuration hassle away.