What is MAMP?
MAMP is an acronym for a group of applications or programs that work together for the purpose of running dynamic internet sites on computer servers that are installed with the Mac OS X operating system. This particular technology is built around the Mac OS X platform but its source codes are “open” for other developers to enhance and improve.

M is for Mac OS X, the base operating system for this platform. A is for Apache, representing the computer/web server. M is for MySQL, the application in-charge with database management. And P is for “PHP, Perl, or Python” – which are programming languages commonly used by web developers. MAMP is released as a platform for developers and not for general production. It comes in two versions, MAMP – the freeware and MAMP PRO, which has added features and benefits for a minimal cost.

MAMP has helped server administrators and web developers in a way that this collection of programs allows for easier server management. In the past, Apache and PHP come pre-installed along with Mac OS X. Although these three applications already provided added functionality, MySQL still needs to be manually installed to have a database management system. It is also said that the Apache and PHP versions that come pre-installed are not always the latest versions and run pretty slow. With MAMP’s entry, server management got easier and quicker. This time, one can run PHP programming scripts up to ten times faster than the pre-installed versions of PHP and Apache.

But not all Mac OS X versions are compatible with MAMP. Only the MAC OS X Tiger or version 10.4 or higher versions are able to support the features of this software collection. It is also recommended that the user has at least 250 megabytes of free disk space to accommodate the MAMP environment or platform.