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20031012 Sunday October 12, 2003

OS X Rocks, but it sucks too OS X is awesome ~ it's beautiful to look at and it's based on Unix. What more could you ask for? Windows XP looks good, RedHat 9 doesn't. Windows XP with Cygwin is almost tollerable, but you still have to type "cd c:" when you want to change drives. What bugs me about OS X is simple *nix things don't work on it. Integrating Apache + Tomcat is a 5 minute job on WinXP and RH 9, but I've spent the at least 10 hours trying to do it on OS X with no luck. I could post the errors here, but what good would it do? This kind of stuff just works on RH 9 and WinXP. Therefore, OS X sucks!

What am I ranting for? No reason really - it just sucks that I've spent so much time trying to do something that still doesn't work. This HowTo didn't help either (building from source had errors, no binary of Apache available). I guess this is all due to the fact that OS X has a 1% (maybe 2%) market share among developers? Posted in Mac OS X at Oct 12 2003, 06:54:12 PM MDT 13 Comments

Comments:

Interesting - I'm just about to do the same thing on my PowerBook. I not a fan of building binaries and I came across this article where you can download mod_jk prebuilt for OSX.

Article -> http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2002/08/20/tomcat_integration.html

Prebuilt mod_jk -> http://www.macdevcenter.com/mac/2002/08/20/examples/osx-jk.zip

I'll let you know how I get on. :-)

Posted by Simon Brown on October 13, 2003 at 09:27 AM MDT #

I still can't figure out why so many of you guys insist on trying to use OSX for development. I have nothing against it, but if it is such a pain in the ass, I can't figure out why. Between WinXP and RH I can almost painlessly duplicate most Unix and Windows environments that my clients have in place. So I am just asking the question, why do so many of you guys go with OSX? Is it because some of you are from the graphics/design backgrounds or something? Now that I can certainly understand. Anyway, whassup with that?

Posted by Chris Custine on October 13, 2003 at 09:34 AM MDT #

I am the author of the Howto mentioned in todays note. As I said to the author of the latter, I do not understand what does he mean with "no binary of Apache available". Of course there are none, for two reasons: 1) the download would be large 2) it is damn easy to compile apache 2. I can write an Howto for that if you really want... I supply the mod_jk and mod_jk2 binaries (I have the ones for 10.3 ready but waiting for that OS to hit the street). I am looking for someone with a complex setup to see how they work. Please use the feedback (the website address I posted) to contact me.

Posted by Giuliano Gavazzi on October 13, 2003 at 10:08 AM MDT #

Chris - I agree with you. I do not use OS X as my primary development environment because it *is* a pain in the ass. My primary reason for loving OS X is the PowerBook, so its hardware not software. Other than that, I like because it looks good, has Unix at its core, and comes with Java installed. As an e-mail and blog-reading machine, it rocks, but it'll never be a good development environment until more developers use it (and find out workarounds for stuff), but I doubt that'll happen.

Posted by Matt Raible on October 13, 2003 at 11:40 AM MDT #

Giuliano - I was able to compile from source today. I'm an idiot and wasn't doing it as root yesterday. I'd like to integrate Tomcat with the built-in Apache, so I could use Apple's tools to start/stop and protect. Maybe Panther will have 2.0.47 integrated, and then it'll be a non-issue.

Posted by Matt Raible on October 13, 2003 at 12:28 PM MDT #

Matt, I don't think there is much voodoo in Apple start/stop (what do you mean by protect). It could be just an issue of editing /System/Library/StartupItems/Apache/Apache, I haven't investigated this, but it seems a reasonable guess. I will have a look at it. Now I have to learn a bit of mod_jk2 configuration (even my mod_jk was not so good, as soon as I tried to add a security-constraint things started going wrong...). Also, aren't there pure java archives to be compiled and installed as part of mod_jkX, or native is enough?

Posted by Giuliano on October 13, 2003 at 01:01 PM MDT #

Chris, I have always developed on Mac, and I have always had the latest of the server applications, apache, sendmail (dropped, now use exim), bind. There are things that you cannot simply do on other platforms, for instance automation and integration between (GUI and not) applications. I was going to say something about Windows, Linux and all that jazz, but then I have thought better.

Posted by Giuliano Gavazzi on October 13, 2003 at 01:16 PM MDT #

[Trackback]

I've been looking at integrating Apache and Tomcat on my PowerBook so that my dev environment more closely matches the box hosting my domain. Although I really do like open source, one of the biggest...

Posted by Simon Brown's weblog on October 13, 2003 at 03:30 PM MDT #

I'm not sure what you think you should be typing rather than "cd c:" under Cygwin, but cd "/cygdrive/c" works just as well while preserving the single-root nature of the Unix filesystem.

Posted by Robert Sanders on October 13, 2003 at 08:58 PM MDT #

Just a test, sorry.

Posted by Lars Hoss on October 14, 2003 at 03:51 PM MDT #

Granted, it's not Apache or Tomcat, but if you download any pure java servlet container (Resin, Jetty, Orion), you're up and running in under a minute.

Posted by Hani Suleiman on October 15, 2003 at 11:27 AM MDT #

Is it possible to integrate Resin or Orion with Apache? The reason I ask is because my ISP uses Apache for virtual hosting. If I could hook Resin or Orion into Apache - voila - I could run those on this site!

Posted by Matt Raible on October 15, 2003 at 12:08 PM MDT #

http://www.tvattman.se/ref/cse-apache-unix.xtp

Posted by Unknown on October 15, 2003 at 06:04 PM MDT #

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Matt Raible is a Web Architecture Consultant specializing in open source frameworks.
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