Jerry Britton's Blog

Over the past few weeks I have successfully migrated the Merchandise Service eStore off of a legacy system, WebServer 4D. WS4D was a great product. However, like so many "great products", it was from a one-man-shop. Unfortunately, he ceased work on the product about five years ago for unknown reasons. We were running five year old software on an eight year old machine on MacOS 9. It was only a matter of time until something gave out!

Out of the mailing list of WS4D users came the recommendation for X-Cart ( www.x-cart.com ). After reviewing several products, and having recommendations for this, I went with it. X-Cart is php-based and uses MySQL -- both already in place on my server. So I took the plunge, spent several months on configuration and product migration, and went live two weeks ago. So far, so good. It's much faster. The features are greater. The interface to users is better. Score one for X-Cart!

Now I just have to migrate my databases to MySQL and I will be done with the old box!

Another aspect new to my server upgrade is the availability of php and MySQL. I've wanted to delve into these technologies for years, but now they are at hand and became a necessity for migration of my web sites.

Wow, turns out php ( http://php.net/ ) is not only really cool, but really easy to learn! That is, if you are already developing web sites. php is basically a "flavor" of server side includes. php code executes on the server before the page is sent to the user's browser. Not only could I replace all of my previous server's SSI's, but I was able to replace many JavaScript scripts in my previous code... code which has to download to the user's browser and then execute... often with compatibility concerns. php is sweet!

MySQL, as I had expected, has a learning curve. It's not a difficult language. It's just tough to find a good starting point! So I went out and purchased "php and MySQL for Dummies"... you know, the yellow books!!! A quick look at the bookstore revealed that the sample projects had code close enough that I could cannibalize... and put off the real learning until later! All of my site's page counters are maintained in MySQL and I am experimenting with a forum application that stores its data in the MySQL server.

I wish I had done this sooner... and am glad that Leopard Server spurred me to do it now!

A little over a week ago I began an upgrade that I have waited over a year to do. It was the summer of 2006 when Apple announced MacOS Leopard Server and I knew that I wanted to move to it.

With a two server internet presence, one of my machines was running QuickDNS Pro (DNS), Eudora Internet Mail Server (SMTP and POP), and LetterRip Pro (mailing lists). My other server was running WebServer 4D (a legacy and aging HTTP app) and Rumpus (FTP).

Leopard Server held the promise of bringing me up to date, and adding services such as IMAP, blogs, wikis, VPN, php, and MySQL. So when it finally shipped in October 2007, my order was in!

The first goal was to replace DNS, mail, and list services. This went fairly well, but the configuration of the SMTP server "went south" and I limped along for nearly six days until the right combination of settings was finally attained.

While Apple is known for their ease-of-use Macintosh interface, Leopard is truly a UNIX solution. Apple has added some GUI's to take away some of the intimidation of UNIX, but the bottom line is that it is still UNIX under the hood. In the case of the mail component, it is actually separate open source projects to handle SMTP, POP, and IMAP. The SMTP is handled by Postfix, and I found myself needing help.

So here's where the credit is due... I found this web site -- http://osx.topicdesk.com/ -- run by Athanasios Alexandrides. I believe he's in Switzerland. He was a huge help and got me back online. So if you find yourself in a similar situation, configuring Leopard Server's mail components, he's my "go to" guy!