Dan Benjamin has updated his awesome instructions for Hivelogic - The Narrative - Building Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X. I’ve used these instructions in the past and they work great. The advantage of his method is that you compile the software from source (don’t be afraid it’s really easy) so you have great control over your configuration and upgrades will be easier.
Jay Pipes - co-author of Pro MySQL - recently spoke at Google on MySQL Performance Tuning Best Practices. You can watch the full video of his presentation to learn more about tuning your database applications.
Colleague Mike Haugland has posted his experiences compiling Apache 2.2.3, PHP 5.1.5 and MySQLi on Intel Mac. I too experienced similar struggles - so you may find this post helpfule!
My new favorite web-based discussion forum softare Vanilla, has just left beta! Version 1.0 is definately worth a look. This simple and elegant forum software is easy to install and use. It is coded with PHP and MySQL so makes a nice match with most hosting packages. The UI makes good use of AJAX, so page load times are excellent.
activeCollab is a free open source project management and collaboration tool. This web-based application is very similar to 37 Signal’s Basecamp project management tool, but instead of a hosted service, activeCollab is an application you download and install on your web server. The tool requires PHP and MySQL, so should be easy to install on most hosting packages.
It continues to amaze me the number of times a client give us an Access database that needs to be converted to a web application. One of the tools I have found to work really well at making the conversion is Access To MySQL. It is a free utility that will help convert your Access databases to the open source mySQL.
MySQL to JSON appears to be a very useful PHP class that will convert data from MySQL query results into a JavaScript expression in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
It takes a MySQL query result handle and retrieves the query result column names and the query result data.
The class generates the definition of a JavaScript object in JSON that contains an array of a rows of query result data.
Each array element represents an object with the properties set to the query result column names. The property values are the query results for the respective row and column.
Your new Mac makes an excellent web application development system and a great database to power that web app is MySQL. O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter has an article that will help you with Managing MySQL on Mac OS X. Their coverage includeds installing mySQL then getting a GUI based tool to manage your databases.
Looking to make your PHP scripts run a little faster? Check out these Simple Optimization Tips for PHP and MySQL.
Quick Lookup is simply the most amazing web programming reference I have come across in quite a long time. It is an AJAX enabled tool that allows for quick lookup of syntax for PHP, MySQL, JavaScript and CSS. You can load it into your sidebar for easy access.
