PHP

While a am working on my secret project, I found a need for a local developing and testing environment which would provide the functionality of a LAMP stack (a WAMP Stack in my case). I had known about this nifty tool for a while, but had never had a chance to play with it at all. It's called XAMPP - it is essentially a WAMP or LAMP or MAMP stack rolled into ONE pre-configured package that you can run on just about any system.

While working on a project; designing a RIA in Adobe Flex, I was using the a Data Grid, and populating it using a HTTP Service that ran PHP.

It was a painful process.

Trying to retrieve data from a webpage shouldn't be that hard in PHP, and it isn't. I've been using Curl to do just that. It comes with tons of options and lots of help and references.

I installed Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2 and mySQL 5.0. Everything seemed to be going great, until I tried to open a connection from PHP to mySQL. I got the dreaded error.

Call to undefined function mysql_connect()

So, off I went looking for a solution. I checked Google, I read though about 50+ threads/posts on various websites. I checked Experts-Exchange, and read a bunch of posts there, and nothing.

I tired all the normal stuff: