I have SSL running on my MAMP server. One of my projects has all the drupal /admin pages under SSL.
First, how to do that? I followed instructions on this page:
http://www.webopius.com/content/355/getting-mamp-working-with-ssl-on-os-x
which include

• generating a free ssl certificate and installing it under the MAMP directory
• configuring ssl.conf in MAMP/conf/apache to find your certificate, listen at port 443, and name your local ssl site
• changing MAMP config in http.conf to use port 80 instead of its usual 8888.

Hi there! Be sure to look at my site meimuffins.com. Just to show I'm not 100% geek!

First, get Eclipse to work well with Drupal. Here are instructions for this first step:
http://drupal.org/node/75242

For Zend debugging, follow the instructions in these urls:

http://slashgeek.com/?p=341

http://echodittolabs.org/blog/2010/08/how-configure-eclipse-pdt-zend-ser...

One edit to the last: the path is
Eclipse->Preferences->PHP->Debug->Installed Debuggers. The author left out '->PHP'.

here's another helpfpul link referred to in a comment on slashgeek: