Setting up a local server

I have been using a combination of Midphase hosting and Transmit FTP software for development of LearnIt. I had been doing this because I thought setting up a server locally on my MacBook would be a hassle. Transmit has been working great, but Midphase has been a little dissapointing (seems that they have to shutdown the server a lot, causing lots of downtime). So I decided to try to set up a local server on my Macbook. I found that it really isn't difficult at all...

I found this excellent freeware software called MAMP, which sets up the local server and installs Apache, MySQL 4, and PHP 5. It sets up PHPMyAdmin and some other open source software. I was setting up databases and doing MySQL queries via php files in a matter of minutes. It was almost too easy.