Is Mac OS-X the best web environment for YACS?

As expected, the full setup of the new computer has been very easy, including the secured access to the Wi-Fi network, connections to existing shared drives and to a large laser printer from HP. It took us only some minutes to complete the full installation and to update the software through the Internet.

The next step has been the installation of Mozilla Firefox to complement Safari, because of the powerful extensions available, including the Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, and YSlow from Yahoo!

Then has come the installation of MAMP, to get a fully-fledged dynamic web site based on Apache, MySQL and PHP. MAMP has a very nice widget to control web services from within the dashboard.

MAMP also includes phpMyAdmin, and I have used it to create a first MySQL database. Just after that I have downloaded the YACS archive, and have exploded files in the htdocs directory of MAP. The installation of the software has been a breeze, and in minutes I had my first YACS server on a Mac. By the way, because the operating system is based on Unix, it clearly outperforms response times achieved on the previous development machine, based on Windows XP.

To complement the toolbox I have added TextWrangler, a text editor to modify PHP scripts, and KompoZer, a WYSIWYG editor to edit HTML pages and related CSS.

At the end of the day, the entire toolbox is very similar to the previous one under Windows. Actually, only the text editor is fully specific to the OSX environment. For the rest, the operating system fully leverages the power and universality of Firefox and of Unix.