I’ve been recommended a few things from various sources, but unfortunately I just don’t have the time to research them all. MacPorts is one that firstly I couldn’t get working for some unknown reason, and secondly was something I didn’t really know how to use. My initial solution is MAMP, however, exceptions aren’t shown through Apache even though the Apache option is set to show them by default, so I can’t quite figure that out just yet.
The first thing to get is MAMP which is very simple to set up. The only thing to note out is that you can change the htdocs directory in the MAMP settings which will be important later on. The setup is straight forward, and phpMyAdmin is included with it allowing for faster development. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
Secondly you should go to the Eclipse website and get a copy of PDT All-in-one (Mac OS X Carbon). There’s going to be further versions, but I’m using 1.0.3 as it’s the latest. It includes a version of Eclipse which works happily with PDT (developed by Zend). This allows an environment where you can work with various web tools such as XML, PHP, SQL etc.
Pretty straightforward, here’s the link http://www.eclipse.org/pdt/downloads/
I’m a busy bee, and if you leave a comment, good luck with getting it approved as I have 539 comments in my spam queue at the moment 
