Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Leopard for the Web Developer

I did it. I pre-ordered Mac OS X Leopard. I'm looking forward to getting it for lots of reasons, but primarily because I plan on setting up a system that's just super righteous for a web developer (mostly java and php related).

In the posts to come, I'll list the steps involved in installing and configuring various features. My ultimate goal is to set up a disk image that contains the righteous set-up, so that I can restore it to my hard drive when I need to. I'll do this by installing Leopard onto an external drive before I actually install it on my Mac. This will afford me the luxury of making a disk image that's totally clean and uncluttered of the personal stuff, and allow me to continue work as usual while I perfect the Leopard install.

Stay tuned! Among the things I plan on doing include:

  • Configuring Apache Virtualhosts to handle custom domains under development.
  • Setting up the hosts file for those domains
  • Running PHP4 and PHP5 on the same apache install - both as a module!
  • Install Tomcat 5.5 and Tomcat 6 - maybe to run as a service
  • Connect Apache web server to Tomcat installations with modjk
  • Create at least one self-signed SSL Certificate for testing Secure domains in Apache
  • Install Eclipse as well as various plugins
  • Install Maven
  • Install Subversion
  • Install MySQL
  • I haven't played with it yet, but it seems like a glaring omission to leave out a Ruby on Rails set up. I may do that if I get inspired.
  • Install virtualization software. I have Parallels 2 now, but I'm considering a move to VMWare's Fusion. It's really a matter of dedicating the dollars. An upgrade to Parallels 3 is almost the same as buying Fusion outright.
So there it is! I expect that I'll get rolling with the details this weekend.

5 comments:

billo said...

If you figure out how to connect Apache web server to Tomcat installations with modjk on leopard, let me know. I'm stumped. I built the connector, and Apache/Leopard apparently doesn't want to load one that is i386 only; it apparently wants x86_64.

From my system.log:

Oct 29 16:19:53 buffy org.apache.httpd[16415]: httpd: Syntax error on line 113 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Cannot load /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so into server: dlopen(/usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so, 10): no suitable image found. Did find:\n\t/usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so: mach-o, but wrong architecture

Eric said...

Thanks for the heads up!

I have modjk connecting tomcat to apache in OS X 10.4, which was pretty straight forward to set up. I was really hoping that Leopard wouldn't present any surprises. I'll definitely post whatever I find.

billo said...

I had it all set up on Tiger no problem. It boils down to two problems:

1. Leopard is Apache 2.2 and not 1.3

2. The Makefile for tomcat jk connector set the architecture to i386, and you must hack the crap out of the Makefile to force it to x86_64.

It's working for me now.

Eric said...

Thanks for the info!

I checked out the Makefile for the version I have on Tiger, and I find nothing for x86_64. It's all i386.

Did you just swap out "x86_64" wherever you saw "i386"?

I'll also have you know that your valuable comments were the impetus for me to FINALLY throw some CSS at the commments on this blog :-)

billo said...

See my blog post for how-to