XAMMP is a very user-friendly packaging of one of the most popular web servers out there: Apache. It comes in a neat little installable package with the popular MySQL database server, PHP for scripting your web pages, FileZilla FTP server and several other useful servers and applications which are all ready to go after installation. Perfect for personal use or use in a small business, easy to setup and maintain and with support for many languages.
If you’re looking for a solution that has a minimal memory footprint, you might want to try Abyss instead, but that requires a bit more configuration if you want PHP and MySQL to work with that too. If you’re looking for something light and fast, go for something like lighttpd.
pro: free, open, easy to setup, has all the essentials.
con: bit heavy on system resources, some presets may get in the way of professional users.
verdict: [rate 4]
