"Simple" app server setup under Mac OS X Server?

Question

With Mac OS X Server's included (or freely available) tools, a background in Objective-C and some rusty familiarity with scripting languages...how might one go about "easily" employing REST**ful **JSON services under Mac OS X Server?

This is mostly for prototyping so simplicity and GUI tools are appealing though not at the expense of a robust foundation.

Edit: Tickling this to see if anything's changed with Snow Leopard

Answer 1

Consider using simply Apache + PHP. Stable, fast, tons of knowledge and examples out there. And you may already have it running on your server.

PHP has a c'ish syntax and is easy to pick up.

See this for help in getting it running: http://foundationphp.com/tutorials/php_leopard.php

Answer 2

It really depends on your benchmark for "simple". With OS X Server, you have a lot of choices:

• Use WebObjects, if you want to leverage your skills with Objective-C (or even Java, for that matter, if you know Java).
• Use PHP... Apache and PHP are built in.
• Use Python and Django/TurboGears/Twisted/Plone/WSGI/ModPython.
• Use Ruby and Rails.
• Use Perl and CGI... or any language and CGI, for that matter.
• Use Java and Tomcat.
• Use Java and Tomcat + JBoss.

It's both a blessing and a curse, in your case, that OS X Server supports almost anything. Heck, you could almost even patch CGI to AppleScript if you wanted to (aside: I'm sure we both just cringed at that :-) ). There are a lot of built-in, free, options with OS X (Client) and OS X (Server).

PHP may seem your easiest choice for the default install of Apache and its configuration, but Ruby/Rails or Python are almost as readily available out-of-the-box.