Why do we need to know this?
A local server is a server that is hosted locally on your machine or local computer. With the help of a local server, you can test your website as many times you want before updating it to the web server. It saves your time as well as it is easy to use.
LAMP, MAMP, WAMP are local servers that are mainly used while developing PHP websites (though they can also serve while developing standard HTML/CSS websites and for testing Structured Query Language queries). This software is mainly used to test the website locally. With these local servers, you can test your website locally, before uploading it to the a web server. By testing locally, you can find out the errors and bugs before uploading. The major difference between LAMP, MAMP, and WAMP is the client location's operating system.
LAMP
The full form of LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It is an open source platform and works on the Linux operating system and uses the Apache web server, the MySQL relational database management system, and PHP object-oriented scripting language. Since this platform has four layers, it can also be called a LAMP stack. It is a cheap and ubiquitous hosting platform. As well as serving static HTML/CSS pages, a LAMP server can generate dynamic web pages that run PHP code and load data from a MySQL database
MAMP
The full form of MAMP stands for Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It is an open source platform and it works on Mac operating system. As a local server, MAMP uses Apache web server, the MySQL relational database management system, and PHP object-oriented language. It gives you all the tools that you need to run WordPress on your machine, for the purpose of development and testing. You can install this on both Mac or Windows-based PCs.
WAMP
The full form of WAMP stands for Windows, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It is an open source platform and uses the Apache web server, the MySQL relational database management system, and PHP object-oriented scripting language. By running this local server on Windows, you can test your web pages (static or dynamic) before publishing them on Opal. It is easy to use and code with PHP. It is available for both 32 bit and 64-bit system. This server works only on Windows operating system.
All the above mentioned local servers are really easy to use and do not need any particular special configuration. All these servers come with a pack of default settings.
Uses
Though we will not use L/M/Wamp in INLS161, it's a good thing to know and, possibly, to try out on your own. Installing it will provide you a server environment in which to practice HTML/CSS and later to practice SQL.
It is not required. You do not have to do this.
We will not do PHP in INLS161 - we will focus solely on HTML and CSS.
why? which?