php and site previews

I'm a Xara Designer Pro X user, with no php experience (yet). When developing websites using Xara, being able to preview prior to uploading to a remote web server has been a hugely valuable capability; in fact I'd say its indispensable for developing/debugging. When incorporating php scripts into web design, how is previewing accomplished? Since I have no clue about this process, there are several possibilities that come to mind, but I've really no idea which scenario (or whether some other) applies:

(1) Will Xara handle (execute) the php scripts with its internal previewing system? This "previewing system" appears to simply call a browser and pass the local url for the file being previewed, which doesn't seem like it would execute php.
(2) Will I need to be running a web server program (such as IIS or Apache), and if so, will Xara play nicely with the server when using Xara's own internal preview system, making the php execution transparent to the developer?
(3) Will it be necessary to exit Xara and preview by having the server software 'serve up' the page? This sounds like a crappy solution...

Thanks to anyone who knows!

Joe

Yes, you will need to install a local web server and publish to your local host.
Xara's preview won't process server side scripting.

Thanks for the quick reply sledger. I wonder if Xara can be configured to pass the web page to the local host during a preview, so it feels more or less transparent to the developer (same Xara workflow)?

Following up a step further, if you or anyone else can weigh in:

It appears that my version of Win 7 x64 includes full IIS. After looking at the options in the control panel, there are a multitude of things that can be enabled separately. I have no clue what the minimum config needed to preview php enabled pages is. Any ideas anyone?

After installing IIS I believe you need to download Web Platform for IIS and then download and install PHP.
In any case, Xara's internal preview still won't work as you hope, it's designed for standard HTML and not server side scripts. There's no configuration options for this.

I use PHP scripts occassionally and quite honestly it's fast enough to publish to a temporary folder at the host server where the site will eventually live to test it, which after all is best policy to ensure it is compatible with the host's configuration.