I'm looking to build a web based solution for a mac, is asp.net and sql compatible?

Question

Also, what is the equivalent of Microsoft IIS for Mac?
Are there any web resources I can use to look further into this?

Answer 1

You probably could get asp.NET working on a Mac if you wanted to. It wouldn't work using the Microsoft version, but there is an open-source project called Mono which implements .NET on a Unix-compatible system, which the Mac is.

However, I would ask: why do you want to? There are tons of open-source solutions that would work much better. My personal preference is Django, a web framework that uses the Python programming language (see http://www.djangoproject.com). Alternatively you could use any of the hundreds of PHP-based solutions such as Joomla or Drupal. See http://www.opensourcecms.com to try some of them out.

You don't need IIS: Apache, the industry-standard web server that runs 80% of the sites in the world (including this one), is actually already installed on your Mac.

There are plenty of open-source SQL databases that would work - MySQL and PostreSQL are the two biggest and best known.

Answer 2

Interesting wording you choose there. First off please explain what you mean by a web solution for a mac.

If you are on a mac and want to design and develop a website you should be able to do that with any decent text editor. You sill want to stay away from the Rich text format editors and stick with ones that are more ascii based like edit pad though. I am sure that you can find mac versions of many of the WYSIWYG editors as well.

If you want to run asp pages or need the .NET framework you will need an IIS server and that is only available on the Microsoft platform. However, when you talk about the server side of things your really talking about the hardware your web host provides unless you intend on putting up your own web server to run 24/7.

If you are like most people out there and just want a website to be able to be viewed on customers with a mac or a pc and want to be able to develop the site on either platform at home you can get a Linux based web hosting account with apache web server and MySQL and PHP on it. There are lots of web hosting plans out there that offer all sorts of features you may be interested in for your site.

For me it is cheaper to use a web hosting service for 1 - 8 websites then it is to keep my computer turned on all the time between the cost of electricity and the internet connection.

If you are just wanting to setup IIS at home to learn about writing ASP or on the .NET platform I would suggest setting up a small network with a pc running Windows 98 or higher as IIS is on the CD and can be installed for free.

Answer 3

Use Apache or XSP

http://weblogs.asp.net/israelio/archive/2005/09/11/424852.aspx
http://www.mono-project.com/ASP.NET

I got it to work, but it did not support AJAX (without manually coding the Javascript) so i switched to IIS.