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Local Hosting on Windows
WAMP vs XAMPP¶
In these acronyms W stands for Windows and X stands for Cross-Platform (Linux, Mac and Windows). The remaining letters stand for Apache (the Web Server), MySQL or MariaDB (the Database Server) and PHP (the scripting language used for Web development). The final P in XAMPP stands for Perl (another scripting language).
You can install each of these software packages independantly on your platform of choice. However, it is often more convenient to install a package that bundles all of the separate items together. So XAMPP works on the three major platforms but WAMP only works on Windows. Aprt from that, they do the same job. They allow you to install and manage your local development environment.
XAMPP is covered in a separate article:
- Local Hosting with XAMPP for Linux, Mac and Windows.
There is a comparison available:
- Umbrella: WAMP vs XAMPP
Local Hosting with WampServer¶
If you are using a Windows computer set up a development environment using WampServer downloaded from the first of the following articles: