Since we live in the technology era, which means we should be up to date with the latest trend of the world. In the recent time, website is one of the most important thing for every single company. A good web design, will lead the company to get more viewer of the website which means it can be beneficial for the company itself. To have such a good web design, a designer should be able to test the web first before publish it on the internet. XAMPP is an application that can be used by the web designer to test their work. It uses the localhost to run all the sub application.

                First of all, XAMPP is a free open source cross platform web server solution stack package developed by Apache Friends (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : XAMPP, 2015). Since XAMPP is a cross platform, it works equally well on Linux, Windows, or Mac. Also, most actual web server use the same component as XAMPP, therefore it will make the transition from the localhost server to a live server become easier. Because the first purpose of XAMPP is to help website designer to test their work on their own computer without any access to internet, so many security features are disabled by default to make it extremely easy to use (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : XAMPP, 2015). Inside the package, there are five sub application that can be used by the web developers to make them easier to test their website. There are Apache, MySQL, Tomcat, FileZilla, and Mercury. Each of the sub application has its own purposes. Each sub application will use different port to avoid chaos in the transport layer.

                Next, we will discuss about one of the sub application in XAMPP which is Apache. Apache or commonly called as Apache HTTP Server is the world’s most used web server software. The growth of World Wide Web was affected by Apache. Even in 2009, Apache was declared as the first web server software that serve more than 100 million websites. Apache also supports some programming language, such as Perl, Python, Tcl, and PHP (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : Apache HTTP Server, 2015). By using Apache, web designer can test their own PHP files before they release it to a live server. Authentication and security option in the Apache server are limited. In the XAMPP itself, Apache uses port number 80 and port number 443. Since it uses port number 80, therefore a web designer cannot use an application that uses the same port number such as Skype. The web designer must activate the Apache first, and then the Skype will automatically assign a new port number for itself.

                Second, I will talk about MySQL as the second sub application in XAMPP. MySQL is an open source relational database management system or shortened RDBMS. The SQL itself stands for Structured Query Language. MySQL is a popular choice of database for use in web application. Some applications that support MySQL are TYPO3, MODx, Joomla, Wordpress, etc (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : MySQL, 2015). In XAMPP, MySQL function is to manage the database that a web designer want to create. The web designer can use phpMyAdmin to manage the database in the localhost so it will make the website that they want to launch in the live server be more realistic since it is using database. In XAMPP, MySQL use port number 3306. One of the advantage by using MYSQL is that MySQL lets the user back up by archiving the raw data files instead of using separate backup and restore utility. 

                The next sub application is FileZilla. FileZilla is an FTP application, consisting of FileZilla Client and FileZilla server. Client binaries are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X while server binaries are available for Windows only (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : FileZilla, 2015). By using FTP, the user can transfer files from FTP server to another FTP server. Using FileZilla is easy because it uses drag and drop interface. However, FileZilla is slowly become a thing of the past because nowadays web interfaces FTP is much easier. In XAMPP, FileZilla using port number 21 and port number 14147.

                The fourth sub application that I will tell you about is Mercury. Mercury or popular called as Mercury Mail Transport System is a mail server who also develops the Pegasus Mail client. Mercury is a fully independent mail server and can provide email services to all standard compliant email clients such as Microsoft Outlook. (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : Mercury Mail Transport Sytem, 2015). The advantages of using mercury are it is low cost, support many protocols, only needs small portion of space (approximately 1.5 MB of disk space and 2 until 3 MB of RAM). The other advantages are it can sustain up to 8,000 mail messages per hour on suitably equipped systems, capable to refuse and bounce email and also capable of eliminating or move to quarantine any Trojan virus. In XAMPP itself, Mercury uses many port number. The port numbers that are used by Mercury are 25, 79, 105, 106, 110, 143, and 2224.

                Last sub application that will be discussed here is the Tomcat. Tomcat is an open source web server that implements several Java EE specifications that provides a pure Java HTTP web server environment for Java code to run in (Wikipedia, Wikipedia : Apache Tomcat, 2015). The usage of Tomcat is actually similar with Apache. The different is actually about the programming language. While Apache support PHP, Perl, and Python. Tomcat only support Java programming language. In the XAMPP itself, Tomcat uses three port numbers. It uses port number 8005, port number 8009 and port number 8080.

                The demand of having a good website is increasing gradually day by day. It means that the opportunities to be a web designer is huge. However as a web designer, you should test your work first before publish it to the live server to make sure that your work is successfully done. XAMPP is one of the solution that can be used for testing a web designer’s work. With a complete package like web server, database management system, file transfer protocol, and mail transport system, it is very beneficial to have XAMPP if you plan to be a good web designer. And since it does not need any internet connection, it will make testing procedure become much easier than you think.