Definitely start with MAMP, in my opinion. As it doesn't build/install anything itself, it keeps your system ultra clean. If you need to move beyond it, just drop it in the trash and you're done. A few hints:
- By default, the apache doc directory is mapped to an os directory inside of the MAMP folder. Change this to something in your ~ directory right away so that if you upgrade MAMP, you won't accidentally write over your work.
- Make sure MAMP dirs are at the beginning of your shell path because there are conflicting binaries pre-installed in OS X (basic, I know).
- In my opinion, the MAMP PRO upgrade is worth it. It gives you much finer control over many things.
- I've only compiled and installed the memcache pecl extension and I did that through the standard make/install process and it worked fine. I just had to drop the memcache.so file into the proper directory and find the right php.ini file to edit to enable it. See this post (and my comment -- 2nd from the end -- to see how to configure MAMP PRO): http://www.lullabot.com/articles/setup-memcached-mamp-sandbo.... Note: I did not use their process to build the extension, I used this: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-... .
- I don't think there is strong support for php pecl extensions in MacPorts, but MacPorts is great for a great many things. For example, I used it to install the memcache daemon.
I hope that helps.
