Apple’s iTunes store is one of the most significant e-commerce projects on the ‘net, and anyone in the business should pay close attention to what they do. Next to Amazon, they’re probably the largest online merchant. Certainly one of the most successful, selling over a billion songs in its first year of operation, and causing a major shake-up of the music industry.

The big news is that they just overcame a major hurdle in dealing with one of the big record companies (EMI): they are now offering DRM-free music files for sale.

iTunes broke all of the rules when it came to the 80/20 rule, and was a major focus point in Chris Anderson’s famous book on Internet economics, The Long Tail.

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I recently setup the so-called “MAMP” (MacOSX, Apache2, MySQL and PHP) on my laptop, so I can have a portable web development environment. I decided to use MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) for Apache2 and PHP5, which makes things a lot easier. There were a few “gotchas” though, so I thought I’d share what I learned. If you want an installation completely based on MacPorts builds, this site has some good instructions.

I went with the binary installation package from MySQL.com, instead of using the MacPorts version, for aesthetic reasons: it comes with a cool preference panel component for starting and stopping the server (click the thumbnail to the right for a larger image). Using this version instead does require a slight tweak to get the MacPorts packages to link to it, but its easy to do.

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