Here at HyperArts, the Mac users in our group use MAMP as a basis for our local web development environment. It's a sweet set-up that makes our individual PHP, MySQL, and server installs easy to manage. The "one-click-solution for setting up your personal webserver" works as advertised and does it beautifully. Gone for us are the days of fudging with different config files whose locations we'd just as soon forget.

One thing that MAMP doesn't do, however, that would make it the ultimate all-in-one local web development app is virtual hosting. Virtual hosting is essential in developing multiple sites which use root-relative links. One can certainly dive into hidden system files (or in this case, nested MAMP files) and enter each local site in the designated host file. But since we are partial to GUI-based apps, our initial attention went to Headdress. Headdress was great for a while until I found myself having to launch the program each time I wanted to view a site in a browser. Headdress designates port numbers (http://localhost:9001) to locally-hosted files, and when you have a dozen or more, they're difficult to remember. This made me miss my old name-based set-up (before Apple nixed NetInfo Manager) where all I had to do was type in a browser the local domain name and TLD of my choosing for a particular site (e.g. http://clientsite.dev) and I was there.

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