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Web hosting with the Macintosh has been an excellent choice for stable and secure environments for well over a decade. Since the advent of MacHTTP, the evolution of Webstar (prior to WebstarV), and many similar and powerful solutions such as Communigate Pro, iTools, Kerio CrushFTP, Rumpus, LetterRip, EIMS and many other solutions, the Macintosh has remained a well-respected server platform.
With the introduction of OSX Server in March 1999, Apple began its migration to a much more modern operating system with all of the power and potential of its Unix underpinnings. The server product has continued its substantial evolution from v1.0 to the current release, and with each release, the webhosting components have been enhanced.
The consumer version of OSX was initially released in March 2001 with v10.0. Its wider adoption began in earnest over the next year as stability and features improved to the point of widespread usability at the latter half of the 10.1 releases.
By the time 10.3 was released in 2003, using Apache 1.3 or Apache 2 on OSX was becoming mainstream. OSXS supported only Apache 1.3 via the admin GUI tools, and it would not be until 10.5 before Apple would finally support Apache 2 in any rudimentary form via the GUI admin toolset in OSXS.
Webhosting remains somewhat inflexible with Apple's GUI toolset, but the platform presents an excellent hosting environment for the command-line competent. This documentation covers the basics on hosting web, ftp, mail and ancillary services on the Mac, primarily though the existing toolsets Apple provides in their administrative applications. Apple clearly has a long way to go to grow and mature the provided GUI applications, and could be the frontrunner of proper webhosting if they choose to do so. This document focuses on what they have in Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5).
One of the premier coding tools is the text editor BBEdit. BBEdit is published by BareBones Software. Included in BBEdit is a customizable palette of code snippets called 'Clippings'. Additional Clippings for web designers have been developed and collected by the webmasters at RDUonline, and are available to you here.