We're talking about novice web development and you're invoking AWS?
PHP is unzip, plug and play. Or single click any VPS "LAMP" package and go.
EDIT: Also, let's assume the target person runs a Windows machine. XAMPP is at least... 10 times easier to set up than Ruby/Rails on a local instance. And that's being exceptionally charitable.
We're talking about novice web development and you're invoking AWS?
PHP is unzip, plug and play. Or single click any VPS "LAMP" package and go.
EDIT: Also, let's assume the target person runs a Windows machine. XAMPP is at least... 10 times easier to set up than Ruby/Rails on a local instance. And that's being exceptionally charitable.