Planning to set-up new development environment, but haven't yet quite decided between MAMP and installing Apache and MySQL locally?
There is also 3rd option, run LAMP stack virtuallized locally.

Benefits of running your XAMP (apache, mysql & php) stack in virtualbox has many benefits.
- Like having same environment as in production.
- All libraries are not (easily) available to all platforms.
- Freeing resources is easy, just shutdown your virtualmachine.