Coda looks nice - but for all my coding, including PHP, I live and breathe TextMate. If you never do anything but web-development, I’m sure Coda is worth the money, but if you ever need to stray into Python, XML, LaTeX, Java - whatever TextMate is the way to go. And PHP/HTML/JS/CSS is works just as well. When it comes to coda though, I get the feeling it’s sort of centered around a “old-school” non-frameworky paradigm. Seems it would be messy to develop for CI in it. I’d sure like to hear some details about this from people developing for CI in Coda.
I’ve never tried MAMP or XAMPP. I always just used the built in Apache/PHP. Now that I’ve got Leopard It’s Apache 2 and PHP 5 which is nice. MySQL I download directly from the MySQL downloads site. The binary they have for 10.4 works on 10.5 also, but there are a few quirks: you’ve got to do some terminal-fiddling to start up the mysql-server. (Since I never shut down my machine, that’s not much of a problem for me - did it once, won’t have to do it again in a while)