Price: Freeware
Shipping Medium: Only available as a Download.
Rating: 5/5
Windows 32 environments
-- Win98Se: only apache/mysql support
-- Windows 2000 (w2k): all servers okay
-- Windows Server 2003 R2: all servers okay
-- Windows XP Service Pack 2: all servers okay
-- VISTA Ultimate: all servers okay
Linux
-- Not listed on their site. Keep in mind it is a collection of several servers.
OS X
-- Mac OS X 10.4 (Intel & PPC) and higher.
Solaris
-- Tested with Solaris 8 and tested with Solaris 9
-- On their Forum I read about good results with the free and open source Solaris 10
Description
Many people know from their own experience that it's not easy to install an Apache web server and it gets harder if you want to add MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start.
At the moment there are four XAMPP versions:
-- a version for Linux systems (tested for Ubuntu, SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake and Debian),
-- a version for Windows 98, NT, 2000, 2003, XP and Vista,
-- a beta version for Solaris SPARC (developed and tested under Solaris 8),
-- and a beta version for Mac OS X.
These Mac OS X and Solaris versions of XAMPP are still in the first steps of development. Use at you own risk!
Review
Having personally compiled configured and set up a lamp stack a few times, just to be able to START my work, this is a welcomed solution to staying up to date. The packages are usualy very much up to date. I used a solution a few years back called trillian. it was ok. But XAMPP has just about anything I want. I recommend SQLYog over phpMyAdmin but that is a personal preference.
The Good
-- What was once hard is now easy
-- Great community (support forum)
-- Up to date package distributions
-- Easy to use web based admin panel
-- Once you learn where everything is easy to maintain
-- Much much more
The Bad
-- Unsecured with initial install
Final Thoughts
Even if you have a remote host. Maybe like me you have a dedicated development server. It is a good practice to have a local test bed/place to store backups of the online data/scripts. XAMPP allows me to have this with very little system admin headaches. It allows me to focus on what I do, Web Development.
