Lesson learned: don’t mix stacks
First english post on phpblog.it is about PHP development stacks. Since January I’m telecommuting always doing my job of PHP developer for the same company. Having to work at home I need a development environment (LAMP stack) over than my pc (Win XP, from the company) where to test and work on projects. As I can’t hold a second computer only for LAMP, I’ve set up an Ubuntu virtual machine through VMware Workstation that runs over Win XP. Virtual machine ethernet card is bridget so I can access that as working on a simple LAN, browse files thanks to Samba and run NetBeans on my Win XP pc. All works fine.
From Windows I run TortoiseSVN to checkout projects from our main repository to the Samba share on Ubuntu virtual machine (development environment). I works but after some tests I can tell that’s a pain in the ass: very very very slow. Checking out the same project (10MB) in this environment takes more than an hour, on a Ubuntu laptop it takes only a few minutes. The bottleneck is represented by checking out from Windows to Ubuntu, so it’s Samba share.
At this point you should say “you could use SVN directly from your Ubuntu virtual machine”, ok you’re right but what about avoiding to mix stacks? If you feel comfortable with Windows set up a WAMP stack and work with it (as one of my colleagues, he’s happy with it), if you’re a Linux boy set up a LAMP stack and if you’re a geeky rich dev think about a MAMP.
In the next few days I’m going to set up a dual boot on my company’s pc with Ubuntu, sure. Lesson learned: don’t mix stacks.
