Manage Your Websites Locally With MAMP Pro
As any web developer worth his weight in JavaScript knows, you have to test your web sites and applications in detail, and in the environment where they will ultimately exist. This necessitates the need to recreate that environment locally, a sandbox for experimentation and testing. There are several server environments out there, and I don’t want to get into the strengths and weaknesses of them here, but suffice to say that the one most widely used on the interwebs is the open source Apache web server with PHP and MySQL.
In my own experience setting up these environments, especially for multiple sites, has been a challenge to say the least. Usually it involved configuring my profile file and adding lines to my host file, not to mention a good deal of time messing with commands in Terminal. It took time, and sometimes I just couldn’t get it to work.
That is where MAMP Pro comes in. Before I continue, I will note that MAMP Pro is a paid version, and that there is also MAMP, which is free. MAMP Pro is worth the price ($30) for many reasons. It has a simple yet powerful GUI, I can set up a local environment in three clicks, and Pro allows the management of multiple environments simultaneously. Other features include: MySQL configuration, Apache modules, the ability to select between PHP 4 and 5, an email server so that dispatching emails by PHP scripts is possible, and dynamic DNS.
I’ve been using MAMP Pro for a couple of weeks now, and it has quickly become an invaluable tool in my web development toolkit. If you are on a Mac and you develop sites in the Apache environment I would highly recommend this application.
Requirements: Mac OSX 10.4 or later
Tags: Apache, Apple, Applications, Developer, Mac, MySQL, PHP, Programming, Website
