XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP, and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use: just download, extract, and start. Tomcat 6 is also distributed with XAMPP as of version 1.7.4 but upgrading to Tomcat 7 is fairly simple, and we will cover the upgrade process in this recipe.
This recipe is going to allow us to learn how to leverage Apache and Tomcat locally in a pre-configured distribution which can be useful in many situations, not just for mobile applications.
But for the focus of this chapter on mobile development, we are going to look at how we can deploy and test a mobile-web application such as jQuery-Mobile.
First we need to download the ZIP archive distribution of XAMPP from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and, for this recipe, we will cover a Windows installation although Mac OS X, Solaris, and Linux distributions are also available.
"XAMPP Lite" is an extra small XAMPP...