Web Biz

    Finally, after several months of owning a new MacBook Pro (upgraded from a 14in. iBook) I decided to install ColdFusion MX 7 developer edition.  I started out with the idea that this would be relatively simple and painless and only take a couple of minutes, well, I guess I was wrong.  It took a little bit of research and tweaking to discover the easiest way to install CFMX 7 on my MacBook.

    So, here is a step-by-step of what it took me to finally get ColdFusion MX 7 up and running on my MacBook Pro with a MySQL Datasource:

1. Download ColdFusion MX 7 Developer edition for FREE
2. Install ColdFusion using the setup.  Be sure to install a multiserver or J2EE installation.  I could not get the single-server installation to work on the Intel MacBook.
3. After the setup completes, grab this very cool CFMXLauncher utility.  Why?  Because you (like most of us) upgraded to Java 1.5 as a system update through Apple.  And, ColdFusion 7 required Java 1.4.2 and will not work with 1.5.0.  So, you can either change the CurrentJDK symlink located here: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK, or you can use this utility.  It uses the default installation paths to start ColdFusion using Java 1.4.2 automatically.  This allows you to keep using 1.5.0 system-wide (in case you have Java apps that require 1.5), and not make any hacks or modification to your current setup.
4. Once you have that setup, download and install MySQL 5
5. Installation instructions for MySQL from Apple may help.  Thankfully, I had already installed MySQL on my MacBook, and running on the standard port.
6. Before your MySQL Datasource will work, I had to download the latest MySQL JDBC Driver in order for ColdFusion to work with MySQL 5.  Read over the ColdFusion Technote for instructions on how to upgrade the JDBC Driver for MySQL.
7. Test your installation!

Well, thats the short version of what it took to get CFMX 7 and MySQL up and running on my MacBook.