web server: macports vs. mac osx server

[Michael Thon]

Hi All - I'm setting up my research computing environment at a new  
university and I'm thinking of buying all apple hardware and running  
Mac OS X rather than linux, as I have done in the past.  I have been  
tinkering with macports for a while on my macbook and it seems to be  
a great way to manage the open source software I need for life  
science research.

I need to set up a web server with Apache, PHP, Perl, and MySQL and I  
wonder if I should plunk down the extra money for OSX Server or  
install and maintain these applications using macports. I have been  
looking through the macports web site for documentation on installing  
these packages but I  can't find any.  Is any needed?  It looks like  
I will need to have the right set of variants to get all these  
packages installed and talking to one another correctly.  I also  
assume that I need to install the macports version of Apache and that  
I can't use the one installed with OS X?  Is there a tutorial  
somewhere for setting up a web server with macports?

Cheers
Mike