Programming Environment for PHP and Kohana - the Easy and Completely Unproffessional Way

As a complete PHP idiot and not proffesional programmer I was looking for the best programming environment for casual programming. For some reason I did not wanted to polute my computer with apache and PHP, so naturally I looked into virutal machines and LAMP.

After 3 afternoons of messing around with VirtualBox, Ubuntu, PHP and Apache installation I finally successfully installed everything and made sure PHP an Apache is running. I even installed Wordpress, but then, suddenly it turned out that I am not able to install any plugins.

I am sure this was something along the lines of users and access rights, but I just gave up as I am not an expert in Unixes and did not have time to become one.

Then, when browsing on Wordpress.org I found (almost) perfect solution form PHP develompent, which does not reqiure PHP or Apache installation. It is called Instant Wordpress.

When you need to run Apache/PHP (and WordPress for that matter) you just start Instant Wordpress and when you close it, Apache/PHP shuts down and your projects stay untouched, ready for your next session programming session.

I know, I abuse Instant Wordpress as it is intended to develop for Wrodpress (duh!), but I cannot see any reason not to use it for Kohana!