AMPlify Development Speed with MAMP and WAMP
Resources March 26, 2009
Who remembers past years (on a Mac) when each upgrade meant a fresh aquainting, then download and install of Apache and MySQL packages and those scary trips into Terminal for the finishing touches?
Recently it has become easier, Apache is already installed and MySQL packages can be quite easily downloaded and installed with a Preference Pane extension (on the Mac) – but overall it still feels a major effort to get it all correctly installed and setup.
These days are memories of the past since I discovered MAMP (WAMP on the PC).
MAMP stands for:
Mac, the Operating System;
Apache, the Web server;
MySQL, the database server;
Programming languages (PHP, Perl, Python).
(WAMP stands for the same but for the Windows Operating System).
What makes it so exceptional to work with MAMP is that it downloads as a single package and with nothing more than disabling the default Apache server (by disabling WEB SHARING in the SHARING control panel within the SYSTEM PREFS…) and starting up the MAMP server. Once successfully started, the start page with some important information will be displayed in your browser window. From here you can go into phpMyAdmin for creating databases and so on. Within the MAMP preferences you can set which directory will be your root folder and you then call that directory with a simple http://localhost/. No more uploading your PHP files after each change to check how it looks and if it now works, it’s happening all locally and working with Server-Side-Includes finally makes fun again. And if you want to change your MySQL database to another server you can either make a dump as usual or just grab it from the MAMP folder within your Applications folder.
There are only 2 limitations I have found so far: you do need to have Administrator access on your computer to be able to start and stop the MAMP server. The other issues (for me) was trying to get WAMP working in my PC environment – it’s not as easy as on the Mac (which takes nothing more than pointing to a directory) but it’s limited and then trying to setup working aliases ran me into a dead end as we’re working off an internal server which is not the drive on my machine and yeah, I’m not a huge PC buff, I can deal with it but when it comes to a bit more complex things I would need to read up on it and grow a few gray hair – so I gave up quickly and just hooked up my MacBookPro via Ethernet, started up MAMP and pointed to the directory on the network server and bingo, instant success.
If you want to read more on the subject, you can find articles on MAMP and on WAMP at Wikipedia.
