The term XAMPP is an apparent acronym.

However, there is no official acronym

expansion specified on the Apache Friends website. Their homepage header reads
"XAMPP Apache + MariaDB + PHP + Perl", indicating that this abbreviation is a
recursive acronym.

The term can be unofficially broken down as follows:

Letter Meaning
X as an ideographic letter referring to cross-platform[5]
A Apache[6] or its expanded form, Apache HTTP Server[5]
M MariaDB[7] (formerly: MySQL[5][7])
P PHP[6][5]
P PERL[6][5]

MySQL was replaced with MariaDB on 2015-10-19 and beginning with XAMPP versions
5.5.30 and 5.6.14,[7] effectively altering the meaning of the acronym.

While both letters P are de facto interchangeable, convention used at the Apache
Friends website indicates that the first letter P is short for PHP and the latter
letter P is short for Perl.
Prerequisites

XAMPP requires only one zip, tar, 7z, or exe file to be downloaded and run, and
little or no configuration of the various components that make up the web server is
required.[8] The Windows' version of XAMPP requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2017
Redistributable.
Features

XAMPP is regularly updated to the latest releases of Apache, MariaDB, PHP and Perl.
It also comes with a number of other modules including OpenSSL, phpMyAdmin,
MediaWiki, Joomla, WordPress and more.[9] Self-contained, multiple instances of
XAMPP can exist on a single computer, and any given instance can be copied from one
computer to another.[10] XAMPP is offered in both a full and a standard version
(Smaller version).[10]
Usage

The most obvious characteristic of XAMPP is the ease at which a WAMP webserver
stack can be deployed and instantiated.[11] Later some common packaged applications
that could be easily installed were provided by Bitnami.[12]

Officially, XAMPP's designers intended it for use only as a development tool, to

allow website designers and programmers to test their work on their own computers
without any access to the Internet. To make this as easy as possible, many
important security features are disabled by default.[13] XAMPP has the ability to
serve web pages on the World Wide Web.[14] A special tool is provided to password-
protect the most important parts of the package.[15]

XAMPP also provides support for creating and manipulating databases in MariaDB and
SQLite among others.

Once XAMPP is installed, it is possible to treat a localhost like a remote host by

connecting using an FTP client. Using a program like FileZilla has many advantages
when installing a content management system (CMS) like Joomla or WordPress[further
explanation needed]. It is also possible to connect to localhost via FTP with an
HTML editor.
Components
Components included with XAMPP 7.3.6[16] Component On Windows On Linux On
macOS
Apache 2.4.39 Yes Yes Yes
MariaDB 10.3.15 Yes Yes Yes
mcrypt 2.5.8 Yes Yes Yes
PHP 7.3.6 Yes Yes [17] Yes [17]
phpMyAdmin 4.9.0.1 Yes Yes Yes
OpenSSL Yes - 1.1.1c Yes - 1.0.2s Yes - 1.0.2s
Webalizer Yes - 2.23-04 Yes - 2.23-05 Yes - 2.23-05
FileZilla FTP Server 0.9.41 Yes No No
Mercury Mail Transport System 4.63 Yes No No
Strawberry Perl 5.16.3.1 Portable Yes No No
Tomcat 7.0.92 (with mod_proxy_ajp as connector) Yes No No
XAMPP Control Panel 3.2.4 Yes No No
APR 1.5.2 No Yes Yes
APR-utils 1.5.4 No Yes Yes
cUrl 7.45.0 No Yes Yes
expat 2.0.1 No Yes Yes
FPDF 1.7 No Yes Yes
FreeTDS 0.91 No Yes Yes
Freetype2 2.4.8 No Yes Yes
GD 2.0.35 No Yes Yes
gdbm 1.8.3 No Yes Yes
gettext 0.19.8.1 No Yes Yes
ICU4C Library 64.2 No Yes Yes
IMAP C-Client 2007e No Yes Yes
libapreq 2.13 No Yes Yes
libpng 1.5.26 No Yes Yes
libxml 2.0.1 No Yes Yes
libxslt 1.1.33 No Yes Yes
mhash 0.9.9.9 No Yes Yes
Ming 0.4.5 No Yes Yes
mod_perl 2.0.8-dev No Yes Yes
ncurses 5.9 No Yes Yes
OpenLDAP (client) 2.4.21 No Yes Yes
pdf class 0.11.7 No Yes Yes
Perl 5.16.3 No Yes Yes
ProFTPD 1.3.4c No Yes Yes
Sablotron 1.0.3 No Yes Yes
zlib 1.2.11 No Yes Yes