Talking to hardware requirements, it has been seen that PHP sucessfully run on 100 MHz Pentinum machine running Linux and Windows NT , respectively. Performance of such machine was fine for use as a personal development environment. A site expected to receive thousands of requests a day would need faster hardware, of course. Although more resources are needed when comparing a PHP-powered site to a flat HTML site, the requirements are not dramatically different. PHP work on any types of hardware whether it is Intel or , Power PC and Sparc CPUs.
Regarding to operating system PHP run smoothly on Windows NT and its successors, but later version of PHP requires at least Windows 2008/Vista. For UNIX operating systems, PHP works well with Linux and Solaris, as well as others. If you have chosen a PPC based system such as a Macintosh, you may chooose Linux PPC, a version of Linux. You may pursue the commercial WebTen Web Server that runs in the Macintosh OS. Chad Cunningham has contribute has contributed patches for compiling PHP in Apple's OS X. In 1999 Brian Havard added support for IBM's OS/2.
PHP still works best with the Apache Web Server. You can make PHP work with almost any web server using CGI version, but I don't recommend this setup for production web series. If you are using UNIX, we recommend this setup for production Web sites. If you are using UNIX, we recommend compiling PHP as an Apache module.
Other software requirements for PHP are:
A PHP engine : Version 5. Included in XAMPP-Windows.
A web server: Apache HTTP Server 2.0 is recommended. Included in XAMPP Windows.
A database server : MySQL Server 5.0 is recommended. Included in XAMPP Windows.
A PHP debugger: XDebug 2.0 or later.
Installing PHP : To install PHP, I suggest to install AMPP software stack, AMPP package is combination for "Apache MySQL PHP Perl" package. Among the different available option from AMP, I suggest you to choose XAMPP.
XAMPP is the most popular software package which is used to set up a PHP development environment for web services by providing all the required software components. During the process of software deployment, most of the web servers use almost similar components, so use of XAMPP provides easy transition from local server to live server. XAMPP is a AMP stack which stands for cross platform, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl with some additional administrative software tools such as PHPmyAdmin, FileZilla, Mercury mail server and JSP Tomcat server. Other commonly known software packages like XAMPP are WAMP, LAMP and others.
The XAMPP server is used to test the PHP pages. It works as local server. It contains a MySQL database to manage or save data on a local server.
Advantages of XAMPP:
It is free and easy to use and easily available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS.
It is a begginers friendly solution package for full stack web development.
It is a open source software package which gives a easy installation experience.
It is very simple and lightweight to create set up for development, testing and deployment.
It is a time saver and provides several ways for managing configuration changes.
It handles many administrative tasks like checking the status and security.
Software component of XAMPP :
Apache plays the role of processing the HTTP request. It is the actual default web server application. It is the most popular web servers maintained by Apache Software Foundation.
MySQL plays the role of database management system in XAMPP. It helps to store and manage collected data very efficiently. It is an open source and most popular.
PHP is the server side scripting language which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor. It is embedded with HTML code which interacts with the webserver. It is an open source and work well with MySQL and has become a common choice for web developers.
Perl is the high level programming language designed for text editing which serves purpose like web development and networking programming.
If you have any doubt, let me know...