

The original developers of MySQL had some concerns over a company taking over it, and thus created a “spin-off” called MariaDB. MySQL used to be open-source, then Oracle took over it. What is MariaDB? Basically, some history here.XAMPP stands for Cross-Platform ( X), Apache, MariaDB, PHP, and Perl.There are quite a lot of tutorials on how to do this online, but thankfully, someone compiled all of it into a single installation package called XAMPP – Available on Windows, Linux and Mac. To set up a web server stack, we will normally have to install Apache, MySQL, and then PHP individually. 😆 But wait… XAMPP is a little bit different from the rest.

LAMP, WAMP, MAMP – They are really just referring to an Apache-MySQL-PHP web server stack on Windows, Linux, and Mac. PHP (short for Hypertext Preprocessor) is a programming language that is mostly web-oriented. MySQL is an open-source database server offered by Oracle. I don’t think these require any further introduction… They are operating systems.Īpache is an open-source web server that handles HTTP requests and serves out web pages accordingly. THE INFOGRAPHIC What is a server stack? (Click to enlarge)įrom the above common components that we install on a web server, some of you sharp ninjas should have already figured out the mysteries of the Apache, MySQL, and PHP. The “backbone scripts” that do data crunching and processing. Processes transactions and holds various data. HTTP server, or simply, handles the web pages. There is various software available out there in the market, but here is what we typically install on a web server: So in the case of a “webserver stack”, it is a suite of software that turns a computer into a server capable of serving web pages. WHAT ARE COMMONLY INSTALLED ON A WEB SERVER? The software then becomes a part of the server infrastructure that is essential to the operations.

In simple terms, a server stack is just a whole collection of software that you install on the server. In a computing context, a stack is an ordered pile. WAMP, LAMP, MAMP, and XAMPP, in a nutshell, are actually web server stacks – This section will explain more about what it is.Ī server stack is the collection of software that forms the operational infrastructure on a given machine.
