ColdFusion on Mac isn’t easy

Learning how to be a ColdFusion developer on a Mac has had a higher cost to entry than I anticipated. My Dell laptop stopped powering up a couple weeks ago, so I decided to spring for an iBook. Some of the small things I’ve taken for granted have become compromised in this transition from Windows to Mac OS X.

I do all of my enterprise-grade development at work and try my best to leave it there. This is no escaping Windows where I work. We use Windows Server and SQL Server on every project. I’d lie if I said I wasn’t getting used to it.

At home, I work on small projects, this blog being an example. These small projects usually depend on Microsoft Access, which I learned to accept when I signed up for hosting at Host My Site. I know I should have been a little more careful about this, but when I saw that my iBook came with Microsoft Office, I assumed Access would be a part of the package. Well, I was wrong.

Host My Site recently started offering MySQL with the plan I pay for, so I decided to take that route. Installing MySQL and trying to get it to work with ColdFusion helped remind me how horrible I am at installing open source software. (I have yet to ever successfully install an Apache product.) It also helped me realize how much I have forgotten about UNIX since my college days. Argh!

How does this relate to my lack of blogging? I developed the code this blog runs on from scratch and have yet to develop an interface to use for updating the blog. I’ve been writing the HTML behind my blog entries in Dreamweaver and then pasting the code into a field in the blog’s Access database. On a Mac, Access can no longer be used as a front end in this manner. Developing my own front end will prove difficult since I’ve been relying on my Developer Edition of ColdFusion to test my code. ColdFusion can’t even read data from Access on a Mac!

So I guess my woes are mainly rooted in MS Access. It looks like I’m either going to have to get MySQL to work or find another blogging solution. Either way, I’m going to have to spend extra time in my office at work to get the old data out of the Access DB.

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