PHP as a general-purpose language

May 8, 2010 CLI PHP PHP-GTK Winbinder

PHP for desktop, is it worth it?

PHP is described on Wikipedia as:

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.

Taking this into consideration, apps divide in 3 category: web, command line and desktop.

For the Web, PHP is the most popular open-source (and not only) programming language.

PHP CLI

PHP CLI (Command Line Interface) I find it very interesting, even though is not used at it’s full potential. A lot of developers prefer shell scripting or Perl with no real reason. I’ve been playing around with this tool and I liked the result.

Important frameworks like: Zend, Symfony or Cake PHP are using PHP CLI to generate projects, models, CRUD or other features that can be easily used with a command line.

In the Windows environment the command line is not exactly popular, but in Linux is almost imperative. After all what’s the point of using shell scripting when you can use a powerful language with a lot of features like PHP?

But CLI is not limited just to the command line, it is usually used for cronjobs, pipes, socket-servers etc.

PHP-GTK

When it comes to PHP and desktop usually people thing about PHP-GTK. What do I thing about the project? Is not dead, like it says on the official website, but is not exactly alive. The reason? Gtk is not exactly simple. If you come from the Linux environment probably is not that difficult, but if you usually work on the web is not exactly html… Nevertheless there is a community that keep this project alive.

Nevertheless, it allows developers to build desktop apps in PHP, compatible with a wide variety of operating systems.

But there is an issue, the resulting apps are not exactly compiled code, they must run using a PHP virtual machine. Here is the issue, how do you distribute the app? If you have a small app of only few lines of code, to distribute it with a virtual machine is a little complicated… Also the code is visible, of course there are methods to solve this issue, but there aren’t exactly simple.

This is probabily the most popular PHP platform for desktop, if you can say that about this environment.

The documentation is pretty big, it was taken from the C++ version. Is not as well polished like the PHP manual for instance, but I believe is sufficient.

Winbinder

Compared to PHP-GTK it has an disadvantage, it only works on MS Widows operating system. The advantage is that it has a much simpler API. If I had to choose a PHP platform for desktop, probably I would go for Winbinder. Unfortunately is in the same state, is not dead but is not exactly alive. It also have the support of a community, but without any particular special results.

The issue with the compiled code is found here also, and even more the issue with platform distribution is just as bad. I firmly believe that if you want to develop an app using this platform, to make it work on your computer is the easiest part, to make it work on someone else’s computer is the real issue…

The documentation is pretty small, because of the API. But simplicity is good when it comes to programming, that means you can easily build pretty interesting apps.

Compilers

There a few, and the majority of them have some issue because they use old PHP versions of even old GTK. I’ve spend many hours on Google trying to find some reals solution but with no success.