I need to run Apache with both php 5.2 and 5.3, without other webservers such as nginx, lighttpd, etc. Just Apache HTTPD.

The easiest way to have both PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 on Apache, on the same machine, is to have them run in different webservers (or at least different webserver instances).

I already do this on windows, it works flawlessly because it is easy to specify the conf file that a specific instance loads.

But how can this be achieved on Mac OSX, without ditching the web server that OSX comes with built in ?

The basic is to create N-ip addresses that each apache instance will bind to, for example:

192.168.0.52 - This is for apache httpd with PHP 5.2 192.168.0.53 - This is for apache httpd with PHP 5.3

(each apache will bind to its own ip address)

On OSX, i don't know how to configure HTTPD to start as multiple service/daemon, with different startup httpd.conf files!