The problem is, web developers already have a lot on their plate.
LAMP. The operating system, the web server, the database, and the scripting language. Plus HTML, Javascript, and CSS. And all the frameworks that "simplify" making these work together nicely. Then they have to figure out how to deploy on the test and prod servers. Oh, and they better back everything up. And some redundancy would be good.
That's on top of the existing requirements:
- VCS - Bug tracking - Documentation - Project management (Scrum? PMI? Flying-by-the-seat-of-their-pants?) - UX / UI design - Unit tests
Not to mention having some domain knowledge. The above is fine for a to-do list, but they might also need to know how to solve "real" problems, not just do IT.
I used to think so too, but I changed my mind a few years ago. Have diversity in the environment in the phases leading up to staging/testing leads to many problems being uncovered early - hardcoded paths, platform assumptions, potential performance issues that only show under some circumstances, ...
I think it improves the code if various devs use different installation paths, DB's, development tools and even OS's. I've seen many deployment issues that would have trivially been detected if devs had different environments.
Isn't this exactly what developers are currently doing? A lot of projects are heavily relying on .htaccess files and having the webserver do redirects/pretty URLs for them. They're putting part of the application logic in the webserver...
The problem this creates is that once a developer has it running on their own machine inside Tomcat (or now this PHP built-in webserver) the app is probably coded in such a way that it will ONLY run inside this server, and will never scale. What's more, they often turn it into a production application with real customers depending on it, and blame you if you can't make it scale to handle hundreds or thousands of users.
This is the problem with using "built in" webservers. It encourages developer laziness, and encourages people to kick bad code over the fence to the operations team who has to make it reliable and run in production. Never mind that a built in PHP webserver will never scale to meet the needs of more than a few users.