How is MAMP

Will be gettign my Mac next week and I previously used Linux for testing my websites that uses Pear, PHP, MYSQL .

Can anyone advise:

Will it chew up a lot of resources?

Will it work fine with Pear windows always truggled with this.

What would the root directory be for the server ie on Linix it would be www/htdocs

I haven't used it with Pear, but I do use it for localizing some of my sites for development. I have no problems with resources at all, it is super fast and it doesn't seem too take up too much processing space / memory. I would say, if you ran Pear in Linux, you probably won't have any issues with OS X and Mamp.

The default root directory is a subdirectory in the Mamp application folder titled htdocs, you navigate to it by going to http://localhost:8888 - of course you can change the default values to set it up however you would like, you can also change the default ports and everything as well. So if you want www/htdocs like most servers, you can do that. It does use apache and php, which are already installed in OS X by default (like linux, since os x is unix at it's core).

Hope this helps.

Can you use MAMP as a web server to the internet or is it only for the local computer?

Web server

It can be used for both, as long as you open up the correct web ports on your router , and make sure apache is on port 80 so no need to add port numbers at the end of your URL.

Really you shouldn't even have to open any ports at all.

Mamp

Surly you have to have either ports open or passthroughs to be seen fromt he outside on the wall on the router assuming you have both

Safe bet they have to be opened at the router level.

I'm more familiar with RAD language development these days (Rails, Django, merb), but the concept is the same. It's really not super taxing to live with development tools that don't neatly turn off when you're not using them.

That said, a lot of them can be turned off when not in use, or replaced with simpler tools for development. mysql has a preference panel where you can enable and disable it, and if you don't actually need any complex feature of mysql or postgres during development, sqlite does a job without taxing anything.