The UNIX foundation of Mac OS X and JAVA as a platform independent programming language show their advantages when you search for development tools on the Mac.
You better don’t look back to the times of Mac OS 7, 8 or 9 and the beginning of the web revolution: most of the time you had to deal with stone-age tools as a web developer on the Mac.
But, how can you setup a productive web development environment on the Mac, today? Which software supports the development of server- and database-based web applications?
Let’s do this systematically. We need:

  • A web server, which can handle at least one server-based script language.
  • A database server and an interface for administration.
  • A script editor to write the application – in best case this editor supports the preferred script language with features like syntax highlighting or code completion.
  • A script debugger to find all the bugs within the script.
  • An HTML-, JavaScript- and CSS-editor. Also that editor should have syntax highlighting and code completion features. WYSIWYG previews and editing would be even more elegant.
  • A HTML-, JavaScript- and CSS-debugger would support the developer to create bug free code and follow web-standards.
  • And finally a web browser to test the application in real life … or even many different browsers, so that non of the future users gets trapped by incompatibilities ;-)

That list looks awful, doesn’t it? But don’t mind – there are several open-source projects and commercial products out there to support the web developer on the Mac and make life easier!

In the coming series I’ll focus on the server based script language PHP. But it’s up to you, your preferences and your experience, your customer’s preferences and the scope of your project, whether you use script languages like PERL, Coldfusion, PHP or solutions like JAVA or Flex. The pros and cons of all these solutions would fill books … or we start a discussion within that blog ;-)

In part 2 of the series I will review several PHP development environments.