I currently work for a small software development company that primarily does web development for a traditional LAMP stack where the P stands for PHP. The reason that we primarily work with this stack is because it is a common denominator among web hosting. Customers like it because they can deploy it anywhere, even cheap as dirt, shared, Linux hosting. Lately, the tools support for this stack has improved dramatically. Here is what I use.

At work, I've been using Eclipse with PDT but switched recently to NetBeans since the 6.7 Beta was released. The folks on the NetBeans team have been madly adding support for "dynamic web languages" to the Netbeans product. It turns out that the support for PHP is quite advanced. It took only a few minutes to get it up and running at work. The core PHP oriented NetBeans is only a 26 MB download from here. From the Tools->Plugin menu I installed the ANT and Subversion plugins. The whole feel of NetBeans is snappier. I felt like I shed a few pounds moving away from Eclipse and I don't miss anything that Eclipse had to offer.

At work, all of our projects deploy to Linux servers, and need to be tested in that environment so we run Gentoo servers in VirtualBox, deploying to shared folders. At home, I've found a simpler solution: WampServer, which runs like a champ on Windows 7, unlike Microsoft's Web stack. I wanted to give ASP.NET MVC a try on my Windows 7 laptop, but I couldn't get it to install. Microsoft has an installer that is supposed to give you a complete running ASP.NET development and test environment, except that it crashes instantly in Windows 7. I tried installing the bits separately. Visual Web Developer Express 2008 installed fine. SQL Server Express 2008 installed, but promptly informed me that I needed to get the latest update from Windows Update for it to work properly. That update fails to install on Windows 7, leaving me with an incomplete stack. In comparison, WampServer 2.0 was up and running perfectly in minutes. Microsoft has to know that geeks and hackers are going to be the ones trying out Windows 7. When the open source web stack is easier to install and use than Microsofts own stack, then you know they've lost the race.

If the SQL Server Express 2008 update from Microsoft magically works one of these days on Windows 7, I'll try out ASP.NET MVC, but until that day I'm perfectly happy with NetBeans and the traditional PHP/Apache/MySQL stack. At this point, I will not cry when my Windows 7 RC free trial runs out and I have to go back to Linux. It's not that I'm even excited about ASP.NET MVC, it's just that I have a gaping Microsoft shape hole in my web development experience.