Many would think at this point I am talking about better AJAX support in the core. While we do need better support for AJAX and I am not talking about DWR, I don't think that's what ails Java in its quest for being . At the end we will look at two ways in which we can overcome this problem.

I am assuming that you have downloaded and installed Apache 2.x on your windows machine. Use the latest version 2.2, if you do not have plans to run Subversion on it. Otherwise choose Apache 2.0.x. Install it with the defaults. You may want to however changes the drive on which it is installed. Anyway so you have it running. Then you went to php.net and have downloaded and extracted the zip file to say c:\ or d:\. I am assuming you have then changed the name of php.ini-recommended to php.ini. So far all the steps are straight forward and their install guide is good enough. Now you are feeling happy about it and want to integrate PHP with Apache, right? That's when the fun begins.