A good apache server like xampp or wampserver? are there others, right?

I use Acquia stack for Drupal installations. It’s a pretty complete stack, but not as complete as XAMPP. Yet it’s easier to set up new projects with it because it has an easy set up and configuration wizard. You could set it up and use it only as a server.

Another commonly used server, for Mac OS X, is MAMP, which is a distinct project from WAMP or XAMPP.

The pros to these stacks are a one click install for everything you need. For example, Mac OS X comes with PHP, however it lacks most of the facilities necessary to build a web application. Compiling and configuring PHP or MySQL on Mac OS X is a little more complicated than some web developers want to get for something as trivial as setting up a web server. Configuring path settings and Apache to use your new PHP installation is a little beyond many people, such as web designers, so MAMP, XAMPP, and WAMP instead sandbox everything they need in one location. While anyone who has set up a web server on Linux will know to look for configuration files in /etc, data files in /usr, and so on, neither Windows or Mac OS X (on the surface, anyway) use that filesystem hierarchy so it just doesn’t make sense to a lot of people.

Note that if your server stack doesn’t include a built in wizard or something of the like for configuring your virtual hosts, it might take a bit of fiddling with Apache configuration files (I loathed that when I started learning Apache) for you to get the same functionality out of it as you did with PWS/IIS.

@picardo I think Acquia equates to a very specialized framework for setting up Drupal sites quickly. While convenient, it’s not as generalized as a simple server stack. It’s more along the lines of a web framework—quick configuration, built-in web server—anything to get you staring at a freshly installed site ASAP.

It depends on how long and robust you want your WAMP to be. If you want a full-out production environment then I’d recommend XAMPP as it’s robust and upgradable.

For a quick and dirty server to demo or test out code on, I’d recommend the Bitnami WAMP stack. It’s a super easy install via an executable file that gives you a php environment without any config.

guys, i’ve installed a server, 1 click install, and looks very simple… its called Appserver (http://www.appservnetwork.com/), it installed everything separated, and just configured the whole bunch of mysql, php and apache. I liked the detalid that everything is by its own. I’ve never installed this kind of server… lets give it time and see how it goes.