Web developers - Is it better to do development on your local machine or on a remote host?

Question

What are the pro/cons of doing web development on your local machine rather than on a centralized development server? For those that do dev on your local machine, how do you kee

Answer 1

One problem with testing on localhost is that you might miss things that are links to local files rather than accessible through the browser. My father was always putting links on his camera club web site that were things like 'a href="C:\My Documents\Camera Club\Photos...", and when I'd tell him that he'd farked it up, he'd say "it worked for me". Similarly in a professional environment, you might have things that you forgot to check into source code control, and so they won't get deployed on the real server.

One compromise solution might be to have VMs, either VirtualBox or VMWare or Parallels, so that you can fire up a virtual Solaris, Windows, Mac and/or Linux box to test it - that will show you how your site looks in the default browsers on each, plus you can make sure things actually work through a non-local connection. Even better might be to have a VM that you deploy to, and use that as your web server for testing.

If your base OS is OpenSolaris, you can even use ZFS and use snapshots in order to rollback your VMs back to their base state after each test run.