Will PHP ever success to enter desktop application arena?

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mingmangat
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Will PHP ever success to enter desktop application arena?

Post by mingmangat »

Friends,

In the last two days we can see a new effort to bring PHP into desktop application arena. This effort done by Klorofil Collaboration Project (or Klorofil for short) with their gambArt GUI framework. This is not a new effort. Indeed, we have seen two other warriors before:
- PHP-GTK
- WinBinder

My questions are:

- Will this third warrior (Klorofil with its gambArt) success? What do you think about gambArt compared with other solution? (PHP-GTK, WinBinder).
- How success are PHP-GTK and WinBinder to bring PHP into desktop?
- Do we really need to run PHP as a non-web application? (a.k.a desktop application)

Ming
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onion2k
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Post by onion2k »

Do we really need to run PHP as a non-web application?
No. But that's no reason not to do it.
Roja
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Re: Will PHP ever succeed in the desktop application arena

Post by Roja »

mingmangat wrote:- How success are PHP-GTK and WinBinder to bring PHP into desktop?
Both are fairly successful. They produce working, reliable windows apps from php code.
mingmangat wrote:Do we really need to run PHP as a non-web application? (a.k.a desktop application)
If you don't know another language, or simply prefer PHP to any other language, yes.

Thankfully, whether we "need" to doesn't matter. Only whether we *want* to, and plenty of people do want to. :)
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

If it does, I can't see it being "successful" in comparison to C++ or even Java. You simply do not have enough control, however, with the way things appear to be going, in the future PHP may become as powerful as them, but in it's current form, nah.

:)

btw, this isn't really a code problem Theory and Design? :P
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Post by Roja »

Jenk wrote:If it does, I can't see it being "successful" in comparison to C++ or even Java. You simply do not have enough control, however, with the way things appear to be going, in the future PHP may become as powerful as them, but in it's current form, nah.
Have you looked at the functions in PHP-GTK? Its incredibly full-featured. I'm hard-pressed to think of something I can't do that I would want to do.

Any examples?
Jenk wrote:btw, this isn't really a code problem Theory and Design? :P
Good call. Done.
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

Roja wrote:
Jenk wrote:If it does, I can't see it being "successful" in comparison to C++ or even Java. You simply do not have enough control, however, with the way things appear to be going, in the future PHP may become as powerful as them, but in it's current form, nah.
Have you looked at the functions in PHP-GTK? Its incredibly full-featured. I'm hard-pressed to think of something I can't do that I would want to do.

Any examples?
Admiteddly I haven't even looked at the GTK (until I pressed ctrl+t, ctrl+k, P, H, P, <space>, G, T, K, Enter just now :P)

Does it offer a try/catch/throw methodology like Java/C++? Or overloading like in both Java and C++?

It's these types of "control" I speak of, if it has these then it is already more advanced than I thought :)
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Post by Roja »

Jenk wrote:Does it offer a try/catch/throw methodology like Java/C++? Or overloading like in both Java and C++?

It's these types of "control" I speak of, if it has these then it is already more advanced than I thought :)
I'd argue that exceptions (php5+) can probably be used to make a lightweight try/catch/throw, but there isn't an equivalent/alternative to overloading (to my knowledge). Admittedly, I don't use the php5-only features much, so I'm only going on what I've read.

But, I misunderstood your meaning. NO, Php doesn't offer those. I thought you meant specific-to-desktop-app functionality that php-gtk didn't offer that C did.
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

Indeed, those as well, I haven't read any more than the GTK's overview, but does it offer mouse listeners or "on keypress" or even the blessing that is multithreading?
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Post by Roja »

Jenk wrote:Indeed, those as well, I haven't read any more than the GTK's overview, but does it offer mouse listeners or "on keypress" or even the blessing that is multithreading?
I'll give a qualified yes to the first two.

You'd make a widget, and set a callback to fire based on the user interacting with that widget. The user can interact with the widget in a number of ways ranging from keyboard/mouse clicking of a button to mouse motion.

But multithreading, to my knowledge, isnt there.
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Jenk
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Post by Jenk »

Cool, I'll give it a go if I need to, I've never used multi-threading extensivley except when providing a real time status for a job process.
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m3mn0n
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Re: Will PHP ever success to enter desktop application arena

Post by m3mn0n »

mingmangat wrote:Do we really need to run PHP as a non-web application? (a.k.a desktop application)
I'm not sure if this includes command-line scripts that run system events, but if it does, then I think PHP as is does that well when integrated into an application that requires command-line processing in multiple platforms. So to answer the question, yes.

If you're talking strictly GUI-based apps, I personally don't think believe in that sort of thing simply because I'd prefer C++/Java over PHP-GTK. So no.
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BDKR
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Post by BDKR »

I believe that the trend is moving towards scripting languages for this type of development. It's slow and there are still a lot of stalwarts in place whose voices carry a lot of weight and boom, but if pay attention to other sources outside of the PHP community, you can see it. Python and Ruby are two examples of languages that have amassed a lot of respect and there is more and more acceptance of these two languages for application development everyday.

Then there is Parrot, Mono, .NET, and the whole common runtime environment thing which will have a part here but I won't go into that.

As for PHP getting into that realm. I can see it getting some acceptance there, but not as much as Python and Ruby. I'll list the reasons why.

1) No multithreading
2) There is allready the beginnings of acceptance from the hardcore C++ / Java guys of Python and Ruby. PHP is in the process of missing the boat here.
3) A lot of the same guys above don't have much in the way of respect of PHP as a language and a community.
4) The OO functionality that a lot of those sames guy would like to see wasn't included until recently. And we still don't have namesapces!

I'd love to see PHP with multithreading, but that doesn't appear to be in the cards even for PHP 6. And we probably shouldn't be suprised as most of the core
developers see PHP as being an answer to issues associated with Web Development. Not event driven stuff.

Cheers
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