XAMPP
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
XAMPP is a free software package containing the Apache HTTP Server, MySQL database and necessary tools to use the PHP and Perl programming languages. The program is released under the GNU General Public License and serves as a free, easy-to-use web server, capable of serving dynamic pages. Currently, XAMPP is available for Windows, Linux, Sun Solaris and Mac OS X (the X in its name could stand for any one of these operating systems).
XAMPP is widely named the "lazy man's WAMP/LAMP installation", as it only requires one zip, tar or exe file to be downloaded and run, and very little configuration of the various components that make up the web server is required. XAMPP is regularly updated to incorporate the latest releases of Apache/MySQL/PHP and Perl. It also comes with a number of other modules, including OpenSSL and phpMyAdmin.
Officially, XAMPP is only intended for use as a development tool, to allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers without any access to the Internet. In practice, however, XAMPP is sometimes used to actually serve web pages on the World Wide Web, and with some modifications it is generally secure enough to do so. A special tool is provided to easily password-protect the most important parts of the package.
