Mac OS X: A Web Developer's Dream

Contrary to common beliefs, Mac OS X is a very capable machine for web development.

Web developers often shy away from Mac OS X
, because they believe that it is very unsuitable in terms of web development; this is very untrue, and in this article I will talk about Mac OS X and web development, sorting out truth from fiction.
Myth #1

You can't do any real web development on Mac OS X, including server
scripts such as PHP.
The Truth

You can do the same amount of web development on Mac OS X as you can on any Windows machine; in fact, I have found Mac OS X even easier to set up server scripts. Recently I decided to set up PHP on my Mac at home to find out that Mac OS X Leopard actually comes with Apache2 and PHP5 already installed onto it! All it takes is a few configuration steps to set up PHP5 to work on your computer.
Myth #2

It is much harder to set up the use of web development languages on Mac OS X than it is on Windows.
The Truth

I have actually found it easier to set up different web development languages on my Mac than on my friends Windows computer. A few days after I set up Apache2, PHP5 and MySQL on my Mac I helped a friend do it on his Windows computer. It took at least 3 more hours to get all of them installed on his computer than on mine, and even longer to get MySQL to work because the default configuration file for MySQL on Windows does not have everything needed for it to work.
Myth #3

You might be able to do web development on Mac, but you can't get much further than the things you can do with iWeb.
The Truth

You can do the same scripting on a Mac as you can do on a Windows machine. Saying that you are confined to iWeb is like saying you are confined to Frontpage on Windows.

There are many more myths regarding Mac OS X and web development, but I think that this will help some of you realize that Mac OS X is just as good for web development as Windows is. In the end, the scripting of languages is the same on both machines because the languages do not change depending on operating systems; the only difference I can find is setting up those scripting languages, which I have found to be much easier on Mac OS X than on Windows.