Is it possible to effectively develop PHP applications on Windows that will be deployed on servers running Linux?

* To some extend Yes you can.

* To effectively develop No you cant.

Detail

To some extent you can use Windows as a developer machine for developing PHP Applications. There are several softwares that can help you achieve this with less pain i.e. WAMP, XAMP.

But to effectively develop you need to have a Linux box. There are several options for this you can install linux standalone, dual boot or you can use virtual machine software (VMware, Qemu, Virutal Box). I recommend having same distro, version etc. Following are some reasons for this.

1. There are few PHP modules/extensions that are available only on Linux not on windows.

2. You are using some Operating System specific feature in you PHP application. Although they are not recommended for security reasons and have several alternatives.

3. Having linux as a developer machine helps you find and fix lots of issues locally.

4. Homogeneous environments that is same OS on machines i.e. Linux on development and Linux on server box have several advantages.

Yes, you can, but pay attention to the use of .htaccess file on Linux. The server control file is different if you are using IIS for your PHP. If you are using Apache, then you will probably be OK.

yes it is possible.Because linux is also based on plat form dependent as well as PHP. So they are able to work with windows and can be able deploy the PHP applications to linux servers.