Developing for PHP can be done in several ways. Some like to install all components they want to work with themselves. Others prefer downloading and installing a full "LAMP" stack at once. The latter can be done using XAMPP (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) or MAMP (Mac OS X).
MAMP and XAMPP are packages that consist of an Apache HTTP server, MySQL database, PHP interpreter and some libraries. They are easy to install and get a development environment up in no time and provide all the components required for developing, running, debugging, and unit testing of PHP applications.
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