PC or Mac for this complete newbie? 4

[alexjones]

I am a senior-level Microsoft application(.NET)/database (MS SQL Server- certified) developer by trade. In my off hours, I'm designing an application to maintain and display member data for an organization. It is to be implemented as a PHP-MySQL website on a remote host. I am new to web development in general and PHP and MySQL in particular. I am also hugely disenchanted with Microsoft Vista.

I've heard great things about Mac's Leopard. So I'm soliciting advice and opinions on whether a Mac can support the kind of development tools and environments I would need to leap into PHP-MySQL web development.

 

[vacunita]

While there are web servers that support Mac and MYSQL and PHP can run on MAC, I would use at least for development purposes a PC.
If you don't like Vista, you can just as well use Windows XP or any other Windows you like. And I'm sure it will be cheaper than having a MAC as a web development machine.

Heck I have a Windows 2000 machine acting as my development server.

The point is finding something you are comfortable with while developing.

Then of course there's the consideration, that the machine you write code on can be completely independent to the machine that holds the Web Server ands MYSQL database.

So you could very well have a win2000 PC that runs the server, and code on a MAC laptop, and just save onto the server PC. Very flexible.

Still the answer to your main question is Yes MAC can support PHP/Mysql just fine.

http://www.php.net/manual/en/install.macosx.php

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mac-os-x-installation.html

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[jpadie]

i have developed on a mac (tiger then leopard) for the past 18 months. i'm not going back to PC land but that's personal preference based on the boxes rather than the applications.

I use MAMP from living-e as my dev sandbox. it's a php-mysql-apache server that sits in user land, so when you want to delete it you just drag to the trash.

 

[Foamcow]

I develop solely on a Mac and have done for the last 5 years.
For the last 2 I don't even have a PC for browser testing as I just fire up Parallels with a Windows XP installation. Prior to that I had a Mac and a Windows PC with the Windows machine just used for browser testing.

For my live and 'online' dev hosting I used a LAMP setup. For my offline development I have MAMP Pro on my Macbook.

While there is the need for some people to use Windows for legacy or niche software, personally I can't see any need to use Windows anymore. I plan on getting rid of the las Windows machine I have at home (used by the family) in favour of an iMac and possibly a Mac Mini.

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[webdev007]

Even simpler
get yourself one of those MS Linux ready machine (very,very affordable!)
laod suze, done...

 

[webdev007]

Check this linux distro list

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297509,00.html

 

[Foamcow]

In reply to webdev007, I love Linux as much as anyone however one observation I've made over the years is that it's just not simple enough for the average user.

I firmly believe that's the reason Linux has never had a real foothold in the home market. It's just too arcane. Installation is a pain and if it doesn't go according to plan it requires real knowledge to get working.

Speaking from experience I once (about 6 years back) had enough spare time to install Redhat on one of my PCs. I even went to the expense of buying it as it came with a manual and I didn't have the connection speed to download it. Even with a reasonable knowledge and understanding of computers I gave up after 2 days and resintalled XP.

I know that things are much better now and that there are Live CD distros and I will even concede that perhaps Ubuntu is getting close but it's still not quite a case of putting the CD in and away it goes.

So for the average user wanting to get away from Windows I really do feel that the only viable option is OSX.

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Tyres: Mine's a pint of the black stuff.
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[webdev007]

You are correct, nevertheless asides the "figure out how it works"
install is nowadays a breeze
I used from Redhat 7.2 up to the latest 9 and used also Mandrake.
what is requiring tech knowledge is to decide about partitionning and dual-boot
but is you are ready to dedicate a machine then just let the install do its "thing"
again you are correct working with a Linux platform calls for some reading, trial and error.

 

[alexjones]

Thank you all for taking the time to comment. Have a star!

 

[Karl Blessing]

I was mainly using PCs for years and such and while I can handle them just fine. I ended up getting a macbook for the new job (php/mysql/css/etc developer, yada yada yada).

Now considering you're mostly familiar with microsoft technology (though you say moving to php/mysql) I would recommend you stick with a PC, even though you can load windows up on a mac (just seems like kind of a waste to use a machine that treats your primary OS as a supplement).

I'm pretty much running a small installation of XP on VmWare fusion whenever I need to test a site in IE7 or IE8Beta (or if theres any small application I can't run under OSX), and seems to have very little to no performance hit in the usual habit of having couple browsers open, dreamweaver, FTP application, terminal and so forth.

It's also nice cuz I recompiled apache (which isn't hard to do) as well as PHP5, and added MySQL5 replacing the default install the system had, so working off the machine locally is very easy for me, and quite fast.

But basically a little macbook, apple's cheapest, was rather painless for me (as a developer), and doing all my work off it even using the virtual machine (VmWare as it seems to work a heck of a lot better than Parrallels) was equally as painless. Quite easy to test against FireFox (Windows and OSX), Safari, and IE7/8, and booting up XP in the virtual machine only takes less than 15 to 20 seconds for me, theres really no need for Vista in my opinion.

If you do go the mac route, hit me up on some software recommendations (that are freeware/GPL) for the migration if you don't already have things like dreamweaver. and also about getting the default Apache install to have PHP/MySQL enabled (in a cleaner/native fashion than say LAMP/MAMP and such, and less likely to break as I've experienced).


Karl Blessing

http://www.karlblessing.com