I haven't used many of the older versions so I can't comment on that, but as regards this being a workaround I have to disagree, through work / college I have used XPages / domino, java / tomcat and ASP.NET + C# / IIS and in all
cases / projects I have had a server set up on my machine to test on before deploying to production as this type of problem occurs no matter what the platform is, the only way around this would be to set up a dev environment on the machine with the server and remote into it as any other way would require compiling over the network.
why would your local / test server need a static IP ? could you not just use the machines IP address or localhost since it will be on the same machine ?
Simon