XAMPP is a small and light Apache distribution containing the most common web development technologies in a single package. Its contents, small size, and portability make it the ideal tool for students developing and testing applications in PHP and MySQL. XAMPP is available as a free download in two specific packages: full and lite. While the full package download provides a wide array of development tools, this article will focus on using XAMPP Lite which contains the necessarytechnologies that meet the Ontario Skills Competition standards. As the name implies, the light version is a small package containing Apache HTTP Server, PHP, MySQL, phpMyAdmin, Openssl, and SQLite. For more details on the packaging and versions, refer to TABLE 1.

In order to be able to successfully run XAMPP Lite, you will require 17 MB for the self-extracting ZIP installation archive and at least 118 MB after it has been extracted on a local hard disk or USB drive.

Obtaining and Installing XAMPP
As previously mentioned, XAMPP is a free package available for download and use for various web development tasks. All XAMPP packages and add-ons are distributed through the Apache Friends website at the address: http://www.apachefriends.org/. Once on the website, navigate and find the Windows version of XAMPP Lite and download the self-extracting ZIP archive. After downloading the archive, run and extract its contents into the root path of a hard disk or USB drive. For example, the extract path for a local Windows installation would simply be C:\.

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