Skinnable, Portable Desktop Apps In PHP

joeldg writes "With the new Zend coding contest getting underway, a lot of PHP coders are hacking out some amazing new test code. In that vein and in response to the lack of skinning with PHP-GTK apps, I just finished up writing a tutorial with source code for doing skinnable desktop applications in PHP that run on both Linux and Windows."

Comments

Re:Embedding PHP scripts in an EXE

[unixbum]

"When the EXE is run, it extracts it all and runs the PHP script with the parameters passed on the command line. There are some simple options you can add to the start of your PHP script to tell it to include other files, and if it is a console or GUI app (to show or hide a console)."

So your saying this is basicly a self-extracting archive that executes when run? PriadoBlender (not for production use still in alpha) is a open-source php-compilier/packager that uses the cross-platform PHP Embed API and PECL's bompiler to package the whole shebang in to a execuatable, totally self included and modified to run without conflicts to existing PHP installations. There was a old program (non-opensource) PHPCompilier that did the same thing.

Re:Embedding PHP scripts in an EXE

[Guspaz]

Pretty much, yeah, it's a glorified self-extracting archive. Of course, you can't acheive the same functionality with WinZIP or WinRAR, as they can't hide the PHP console for GUI apps, or pass command line parameters to the PHP script.

I'm sure all those programs are vastly superior to mine; Mine was only a kludge designed to fill a specific need to which I could not find a usable solution.

I should point out that my program, EncPHP, which was released under the LGPL, predates PriadoBlender by over a month; the oldest version in SourceForges archives, the second release, was timestamped "2003-08-07 21:00", with the first release having been finished several days/weeks before then :p

Anyhow, PriadroBlender looks very promising (Certainly superior to my kludge!), and I'll be interested to see how it turns out.

Re:As a sometime PHP user, let me say...

[lscoughlin]

Or perhaps it's simply another language written by people who do not want to have the issues that perl has, and perhaps want a language that lends itself to knowing what you were doing 15 minutes after you started doing it.

Go away perl fanboy, or come up with somethingbetter, after all TIMTOWTT (There Is More Then On Way To Troll).

-T

Re:As a sometime PHP user, let me say...

[CTachyon]

Or perhaps it's simply another language written by people who do not want to have the issues that perl has, and perhaps want a language that lends itself to knowing what you were doing 15 minutes after you started doing it.

Oh, come on. On what planet does it make sense to require e.g. generating SWF (Macromedia Flash) files to either be built in to the core language, or excluded altogether requiring a recompile to install that functionality?

Is adding a use Module; line *really* that much harder for a newbie? He/She still needs to read the documentation anyway to figure out what the available function calls are.