Programming with PHP and GTK, Part 1

Introduction

Have you ever thought of writing a PHP application for client side execution without having a web server present? One of my clients required one of the web applications I had written for him for his website to run on his desktop. Since the whole application was already written, I was dreading the fact that I had to re-code the whole application in another programming language on his desktop.

Since PHP can run from the command line, this got me thinking on how to get the PHP application to run as a windows application. A few searches on Google landed me with the answer to the problem. Combine the programming power of PHP with the GUI's of GTK (Gnome Tool Kit).

Multi-platform PHP-GTK Extensions

PHP-GTK is an extension to PHP which implements the bindings for the GTK toolkit. This extension allows us to create GUI's for our PHP applications using GTK+. The present version of PHP-GTK version 1.0 will run under PHP 4.0.5 or greater and GTK+ 1.2.6. Since the present version of PHP-GTK is available for Linux and Windows, the applications you write, will run on both the platforms without any change in code. This is a cool and easy way to write cross-platform applications.