This recent article on the Redmond Developer News site looks at a partnership one of their largest local businesses, Microsoft, has with Zend and the work they're doing with PHP. They ask "what's next" for these two companies and their future of Microsoft in the community.
Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.
They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.
On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial (by Jack Herrington) talking about working with Adobe AIR and Javascript to make a desktop application for uploading images (or any other files) to a remote server.
To solve the upload problem, most of the big services have dedicated upload applications that run on all the different platforms. But it takes a lot of work to develop them, especially when they have to run on both Macintosh and Windows. Or is it so tough? As it turns out, Adobe AIR technology makes it possible to write applications for any platform using just HTML and JavaScript. It also offers access to cool desktop features, notably drag and drop.
The tutorial shows how to make the application with the HTML/Javascript version of an AIR app (as opposed to Flex) that lets you drag and drop files into it to be uploaded. They make the basic file upload form first as a foundation then extend it to make it accept the remote request (via POST) from the AIR application to handle the uploads. Javascript code and screenshots are included.
The Developer Tutorial site has an introduction to PHP-GTK2 posted - an overview of what the new version (version 2) is and how you can install and use it to develop desktop applications.
PHP-GTK 2 is out, and with it, a fantastic means for PHP developers to build useful, reliable cross-platform desktop applications. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get up and running with PHP-GTK in no time and build your first desktop application.
They look at qhat it is, getting started with it and making your first application (a simple little "Hello World" output box). They also point out some of the demos you can grab as examples and show you how to make something a little more powerful - a window with an input form that generates an md5 hash.
The PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.
Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.
You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.
On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's this post from Janosch Graf about a PHP-GTK desktop project (a desktop environment inside of a PHP-GTK shell) called php-desktop.
php-desktop emulates a desktop using KDE programs/icons
php-desktop is tested with KDE. It also uses KDE programs (for example kde-open) and KDE icons. php-desktop gets the icon by the mimetype of a file. If the file is a desktop-file php-desktop gets the icon from there.
In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:
I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.
We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.
Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.
The Developer Tutorials site has posted a new look at working with PHP in a different sort of environment than most people think - on the desktop.
You've been through it all with the web, from basic database hacks to battling with inconsistent browser rendering, and now you want to have a go at something different.
Of course, the standard destination would be desktop application development.
The work through some of the basics of desktop development as well as some of the advantages and disadvantages to making the move. The include some example code to get you started with a "Hello World" sort of example using the PHP-GTK libraries.
On the Zend Developer Zone, ahamedjais has written up a tutorial that talks to the reader about the creation of an example PHP desktop application via PHP-GTK.
We have been creating web-applications using PHP since it came into existence, now we can also develop Desktop or Stand alone Applications with PHP-GTK. [...] Thanks to PHP-GTK, we can now build cross platform windowed applications with PHP as well.
He starts off by describing what PHP-GTK is and the essentials (like where to get it and how to test to see if your installation is working with some sample code). He also includes links to more resources about PHP-GTK including a PHP-GTK cookbook and a page describing all of the base GTK classes.
In a new post, Elizabeth Smith talks about "perverting Windows" to work with desktop PHP applications via an interesting library - Winbinder.
Writing desktop applications with PHP is considered to be idiotic by many people, but personally I think it's a lot of fun and can be useful. [...] There are more solutions for desktop apps with PHP than people probably realize. [...] So why isn't there a Win32 GUI wrapper for PHP? Well, there is...kind of.
She mentions a few issues she has with the Winbinder software - including lacking support for PHP5 and non-threadsafe code. She's falling back more and more on the "I can write an extension for that" mentality, though and has plans for the future:
Eventually I hope to have a WinUi, WinGdi, and WinSys (processes, threading, registry, et al) to put in pecl. There are some win32 only extensions in PECL, but win32std is the only one I've actually had use for, or even got working properly, and there's no agreement among them in naming convention, API design, or even functions vs. classes. So here I am, playing.
The PHP-GTK Community website as three new posts today all describing applications built with simplicity in mind and created using the PHP-GTK libraries:
the "Click Fast" button that makes use of the Gtk::timeout_add() and Gtk::timeout_remove() functions
a Desktop Widget that can be used for useful information you want to keep in view
visualProxy - an HTTP proxy server and transmit HTTP proxy requests from a WWW user agent to an other proxy or directly to a server. It displays requests graphically and update information on the fly on a detailed list with many fields columns.
Check out their apps and code snippets sections for more examples like these.
