Mac OS X For Web Development

Collaboration, Review and Testing

As I noted earlier, sharing your local Web server on a local network is as easy as a mouse click. If you’re using a dedicated IP address over broadband, or have access to a dynamic DNS service, you can also collaborate remotely, sharing this same local Web server over the Internet.

In an office environment, you will find that past issues with joining your Mac to a Windows or Unix-based network environment no longer remain. Built-in OS X solutions for multi-platform networking allow for plug-and-play-style simplicity when collaborating with users on non-Mac platforms. You can even interact with directory services, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory Services, when logging on to your local network.

While it’s beyond the scope of this piece, it is worth mentioning that Microsoft Office users on OS X can leverage and connect to Microsoft Exchange Servers, which adds value to collaboration via email communications, shared posts and shared calendars.

One of the key benefits of having your development workstation and server together is experienced during review and testing. The ability to drag and drop files to and from CVS or directly onto your Web server saves valuable time during modifications and troubleshooting. The ability to test dynamic database-driven pages and server side scripting “on the fly” locally is powerful and efficient.

Testing opportunities have grown dramatically with standards-centric browsers like Safari (built on the Linux-based KHTML Project), Opera, and Netscape on OS X. These browsers and the traditional Internet Explorer have come a long way in adhering to World Wide Web Consortium Internet standards and for testing DHTML and JavaScript. (Microsoft has announced they will no longer update the browser past 5.2.3, the current version).

Finally, you can run Windows on your OS X desktop when testing cross-platform compliance in Web applications and projects via Virtual PC, which can run all major flavors of Windows desktop operating systems.

A Complete Solution

In closing, we have discovered that OS X can serve as a comprehensive Web development environment supporting the starter Website project to complex Web applications with many participants. The aforementioned tools have all been proven through the years –- the point is that in OS X, they’re consolidated onto one platform for ease of use and functionality.

In a follow up to this article, we'll roll up our sleeves and get under the hood to configure and set up the OS X environment for Web development. Stay tuned!