I currently use XAMPP on Windows 7 for my dev server which is a LAMP stack.
I recently installed cygwin and have been messing around with it. I am just curious, with cygwin since it is like unix/linux does that mean that you can install apache and php just as if you were installing it on a Linux server? I know you can install them on cygwin as I saw them in a package list but I’m not sure if this is the same as if I was installing it on a real production linux server?
From what I read cygwin mimics unix/linux on windows.
It highly depends on your production needs, but after all cygwin is just an emulation-layer and nothing more. It does an incredible job but its hard for me to believe its hardly as reliable as a Unix box.
You can read more about it in this slashdot thread:
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/04/08/12/1932246/cygwin-in-a-production-environment
Shai.