PHP

Although I haven't had need to do so for freelance jobs, I do administer several Windows-based Sybase and MS SQL Servers at my day job.

I had started a post highlighting the recent Eclipse PDT 2.0 release but now find myself dropping the post and the Eclipse IDE altogether. Instead, I'll share why I've switched from Eclipse PDT to NetBeans.

UPDATE:Parlez vous Français? Guillaume Rossolini has created a French translation of this article.

Are you considering using a PHP framework for your next project? If so, this article's for you. I've narrowed down my choices to CakePHP and the Zend Framework and have documented my findings here.

4/2/08 - Added php.ini settings to use the proper MySQL socket at /tmp/mysql.sock.

3/23/08 - After going through these instructions on a new Leopard system, I made a few minor updates. The steps should now work for Leopard as well as Tiger.

While options abound, MacPorts may be the easiest option to configure a local web development environment on your Mac. I'll mention a few of the other options and then share the steps I've used to install Apache 2 and PHP 5 with MacPorts.

I remember how excited I was when Mac OS X was initially released. Finally I had real development tools available on my platform of choice. I could run a web server with middleware to develop database-driven web sites on my laptop. The only problem was that although having Unix file management skills, at the time, I had absolutley no experience compiling the required Unix software from source.