MacLochlainns Weblog

LAMP the ubiquitous acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, Python, or Perl has a couple cousins. They are OPAL (Oracle’s stack on Linux, and MAMP (Mac OS X, Apache, MySQL, and PHP et cetera). Perhaps another acronym on the horizon is: OPAM (Oracle, PHP, Apache, and Mac OS X). OPAM is a guess on my part. Nobody knows what Oracle’s marketing department may choose. Regardless of the acronym for it, Oracle has published instructions for configuring an Oracle/PHP stack on Mac OS X.

I generally configure the OPAL stack with Zend Core for Oracle and the Oracle database on a virtual machine running Windows XP, Windows Vista, Ubuntu, or Red Hat Linux. If you follow my posts I prefer VMWare Fusion over Parallels. The MAMP stack I use is open source and provided by Living E. It follows the pattern of Mac OS X installations, which differs from the recent posting from Oracle. It’s easy to install, as you tell from the documentation. MAMP installs PHP 5.2.6 as the current release.

It’s a great choice when you incorporate the open source Sequel Pro tool. Isn’t it ashame that Sequel Pro doesn’t work natively with Oracle. If I find some time this summer, it might make a great project to extend it to Oracle. The interface to Sequel Pro looks like this:

When you create a connection, you should know the typical values. The database value can be left blank when connecting as the superuser root:

Host:     localhost
User:     root
Password: root
Database: 
Socket:   /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock
Port:     3306

Here’s the connection dialog where you’ll enter the values:

Have fun playing with the MAMP stack.