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Skinnable, Portable Desktop Apps In PHP

Posted by timothy on from the leopard-spots dept.

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."

3 of 36 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot by coyote4til7 · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... leading cheerleader for in-appropriate php apps

    --

    the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
    1. Re:Slashdot by JabberWokky · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Several of my CLI apps are now PHP. It is a good language for interfacing to databases and especially good at creating CLI tools to manage websites written in PHP. From there it was a natural jump to do things like manage my mp3 collection in PHP, a couple cron jobs and things like that.

      PHP compiled in CLI mode is pretty good as a quick tool to make other tools. I'm a die hard shell scripter, but the need to interface with web facing code on many servers led me down the path of using it, and it has really proven to be fairly good. There's a lag on slow machines when first executed, as it compiles to memory whenever a script is executed, and that's about my only complaint.

      --
      Evan "Not as portable as sh, not as common as perl"

      --
      "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  2. Embedding PHP scripts in an EXE by Guspaz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This is probably a good time to mention EncPHP, a program I wrote that encapsulates a PHP script along with most of what it needs to run inside an EXE. Both console and GUI PHP apps are supported, though for GUI apps, if you choose to embed all of GTK inside the app, it's going to be huge.

    It hasn't been updated in ages, but you can check out the latest version here: EncPHP on SourceForge

    The sourcecode is included... it uses a free BASIC compiler to dynamically compile a dependance-free EXE with the PHP script, PHP interpreter, and required DLLs, inside an EXE. 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).