Setting up a Macintosh Server

Apple is trying hard to position the Mac as a viable Internet server, selling preconfigured boxes with PowerPC chips doing incredible things, but as much as I love the Mac (I'm typing on one now) I have to recommend that you avoid it as a server unless it's all you've got. It's the best client yet created, but it's not stable enough for server work, it's working with massive overhead, and the server software that has been written doesn't yet support all the features available on the other platforms.

The main server software for the Mac is MacHTTP, which implements most CGI features. If you like AppleScript a lot, you can use it to write CGI scripts on a Mac, but then those scripts are worthless when you port to any other machine. MacPerl is a better solution, but fairly clunky. Of course, if all you need to do is check HTML documents, or if you need to connect to information that's already on Macs, this could be a great solution.

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Copyright 1995 by Simon St.Laurent. All rights reserved. You may print this document for yourself or others at no charge, but commercial distribution without permission is prohibited.

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