Doing a lot of web design demands that my computers have their own local web servers available for testing and development. On the Mac, that’s not too difficult as it ships with Apache and PHP built-in. The problem is that the built-in version does not include MySQL or the PHP extensions to support it (without some tedious re-building). Well today I discovered MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL and PHP). Just like it’s Linux counterpart, LAMP, it’s an all-in-one solution for setting up a web server with everything you need.
Liam was testing it at work today and I was very impressed with how easy it was to set up. You are literally up and running in no time. The only downside I can see is that it doesn’t support Apache virtual hosts - which is a feature I use all the time to manage multiple web projects on the one server. This functionality is only available in the Pro version (which you have to pay for). Although I’m sure the more determined out there could manually edit the Apache configuration to set it up on the free version.
If you’re interested, you can go check it out at http://www.mamp.info/.
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I use WAMP which is the windows version of the bundled Apache/PHP/MySQL software. It allows me to learn the code without the worry of mucking up anyone else’s. I have put a couple of copies of wordpress (old & new) on it as I find it a good learning tool, fairly well documented, good clean code that can produce valid xhtml. I am not sure I like the new wordpress2.5 yet. Personalising the admin area is not so easy to do.