making cakephp work with xampp under windows

To make CakePHP work under XAMPP, I extracted the CakePHP zip to my htdocs folder, in the folder named app. But, everytime I wanted to access the http://localhost/app I’d receive the Object not found error message. To fix this, I added the following in my httpd.conf:

<Directory “d:\work\my_sites”>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
Options All
AllowOverride All
</Directory>

NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1

<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1>
DocumentRoot “d:\work\my_sites\app1”
ServerName app1.local
</VirtualHost>

And, of course I moved everything to d:\work\my_sites\app1 as you can see from the settings. To make DNS resolution work, I modified the c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file, and added this:

127.0.0.1 app1.local

After which, I navigated to http://app1.local and everything worked.