Apple's MacOS X has, by far, the potential to become one of the most popular Web development environments available. The latest release of MacOS X as of the writing of this document, version 10.1.2, has added a great number of features that will benefit the Web developer. Since it contains an Apache-based Web server, it is well suited to some of the most popular Web technologies today: PHP and MySQL.

Let me be the first to say that I am a completely platform-agnostic Web developer. I respect all types of computers and the powerful tools that are available for each of them. This document is not designed to instigate a platform war. It is only here to inform those developers who wish to develop and deploy PHP/MySQL applications on Apple's MacOS X.

This document is centered around those developers who choose to create Web applications with the finest and most flexible Rapid Application Development tool available, Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDev 4. The steps described here will work equally as well with Windows and Macintosh versions of UltraDev 4. Where there are differences in configuration between the two platforms, they will be noted.

This document is only intended to assist you in getting PHP and MySQL set up on your MacOS X computer, and get UltraDev to talk to them. While most of what you see here will probably work on both the MacOS X Client and MacOS X Server, I don't have a copy of the Server operating system, and these instructions will be specific to the Client version. These instructions were created using MacOS X version 10.1.1. While the steps here will most likely work with version 10.0.x, I can't promise anything.

BIG HUGE IMPORTANT NOTE!

I and several others have noted that these instructions will not work with Mac OS X 10.1.2 if you are running Phakt and UltraDev in Classic and you try to connect to Apache on OS X on the same machine! Applications that make network connections that traverse the gap between Classic and OS X using 10.1.2, whether it be FTP, JDBC, Classic browser, mail client, or whatever, will cause a kernel panic (aka non-recoverable crash that requires rebooting; comparable to the Windows Blue Screen of Death). There is no known workaround for this! There were changes made to the network software in 10.1.2 that are causing problems.

10.1.3 was just released on February 19, but does not appear to allow network connections that cross from Classic to OS X. I'm still trying to find a workaround and will keep you all up to date as I discover things. Right now, I'm just hoping that UD is released soon in a Carbon-compliant version!

So let's get started!

 
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