> I am doing some php work for a local company who uses a mac. I was telling > them that I use apache as my webserver and they want to know what they can > use as their webserver. I know nothing about Macs and don't think you an > run apache but I may be all wrong...what do mac owners use for a webserver?
_A_ mac? Do I sense the fragrance of ancient hardware? First place you want to look is apple.com. After reading the white pages on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, you really should plug "apple web server" and "macintosh web server" and other variants into your favorite search site and look around. You might even run into the fact that a Mac (pre-Mac OS X) was once considered practically impenetrable. (I don't remember if that challenge was ever defeated, the industry just seems to have moved on.) More information than you probably want: Mac OSses 8 and 9 have a personal web server built it. There are also freeware/shareware servers available that will run on Mac OSses 7 and 8. There are some commercial webservers, as well, some of which are being maintained and updated for Mac OS X, one has already been mentioned. I know of a live site being maintained professionally, serving FileMaker files on the web with the personal web server under Mac OS 8.6. It's a low-traffic site, of course. I think there's still an SE running System 6 and serving (hobby) web pages somewhere out there, too, just to show it can be done. Haven't looked for a while. But you should understand that the Mac OS previous to Mac OS X was cooperative multitasking, and it was difficult to serve multiple requests simultaneously on those machines. <on-topic> It'd surprise me if you could serve php on a pre-Mac OS X machine, but you can definitely serve perl (MacPerl) on them. As the others have said, I'd recommend Mac OS X for your customer, for a couple of reasons: First, php is already installed, or, at least, it was there on Mac OS X 10.2 when I got my copy of that. It needs to be updated for security reasons, but it is already in place. All I did was uncomment a couple of lines in httpd.conf and I was testing php pages on my iBook. (Perl is there, too, of course. Perl 5.8 will probably make it into Panther. Java is also there, and installing Tomcat/Struts, and the like is not all that hard.) Second, unless you need to build an absolutely impenetrable site, you and your customer will prefer to have the full Unix-family OS underlying Mac OS X. (Mac OS X is pretty secure, too, anyway. If you need more than that, you might want to look at openbsd, which, incidentally, does run on some Mac hardware.) Third, your customer really doesn't want to serve their site on a box that is also being used to run applications. So, even if the box they are thinking of putting the site on isn't a Mac OS X box, they really want another box, and they might as well get Mac OS X for that box. </on-topic> -- Joel Rees, programmer, Systems Group Altech Corporation (Alpsgiken), Osaka, Japan http://www.alpsgiken.co.jp -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
