What is XAMPP? How do i know that XAMPP has been successfully installed on my system?

XAMPP stands for “X which means “cross-platform”, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl” and is a “solution stack package” that installs each of those items.  Here is a breakdown of what each piece of item does:

Apache: This is the actually web server software.  It takes requests from clients (other computers, for example) and returns the requested content to them.
MySQL: This is the database at backend.
PHP/Perl: These are the languages used for actual web development.  Interpreters need to be installed on the web server so it knows how to understand and display them to the web users.

All these items combined make XAMPP.  It allows you to run a web server that will interpret web sites that run on PHP, Perl or HTML.

Installation:

There are four things to keep in mind for successful installation of XAMPP. These are

1. Disable windows firewall ( Control panel->Disable windows firewall )

2. Disable user activated accounts (  Control panel-> user-> account settings->Disable user activated accounts)

3. Disable port 8080  ( Through IE proxy settings (in connection tab) )

4. Always keep all pages of extension .html and .php in htdocs folder. (  C//xampp:htdocs )

Follow the following steps after installation has been completed.

Step 1: search xampp icon in right bottom corner of your desktop and double click on it. You will see the xampp control panel as below. Select first three options Apache, MySql and FileZilla one by one  and click on Run button. you will see the following screen, showing Running status of all three options. (Run button turns to Stop once you enter it).

Step 2: Now Open Internet Explorer browser and type the url http://localhost/xampp/

Step 3: You will see the following screen. now click on first option (Engish)

Step 4: on this screen click on  phpMyAdmin that falls in Tools category.

If you reach on this screen , that means PHP has been installed successfully.