Page 1 of 1

Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 4:28 am
by abrogard
I'm not sure this dumb question belongs here but I was less sure it belonged in any of the other forums... so, moderator, please excuse me if it's wrong, move it and forgive...

I've been using Visual Studio to build a small app in C# and Asp.net (I'm a pure beginner) and now I belatedly find that this setup is useless for all those Linux servers.

So turn to PHP. Okay. I don't mind. But I'd like to be able to start my app the way I did in visual studio, it was good, drag and drop controls - input box, submit control, file upload control, then just double click on them to have a window open up for the 'onclick' event and write the handler.

with this in mind I've searched everywhere for what I've googled variously as 'php gui', 'php drag and drop', 'php gui ide', 'php ide' and so on....... and I've got at least six different things, the latest of which was Aptana and there's been Dev php3 and vs.php and more....

And none of them do this. None of them. Unless I've failed to see how to do it, which is always possible.

But I was thinking about it and maybe it simply isn't possible with PHP? Like those controls are asp controls, objects with properties and events......... does PHP have controls like that? I suspect not. PHP just handles html objects doesn't it?

All the things I've downloaded are just various levels of fancy editors.

I suspect I'm chasing a phantom.

Could someone please set me straight? Is php so different somehow that I should completely change my mind about how to go about writing apps in php?

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 4:37 am
by Eran
In the browser, most GUI interactions are handled in Javascript which is a client-side language. Server side language such as PHP can only render output - once it's in the browser it has no control over it. ASP.net has a set of built-in Javascript widgets called 'controls', but in practice it's just a code-generator for Javascript. PHP has no built in integration with Javascript, and most people use dedicated javascript frameworks such as jQuery to handle client user interaction.

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 2:39 pm
by greyhoundcode
Someone asked something along similar lines a while ago and I mentioned Delphi for PHP which is still produced and sold by Embarcadero. Take a look.

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Sun May 30, 2010 3:38 pm
by califdon
I just checked and Delphi for PHP is an expensive tool! It may be fine for a professional team, but not many of us are going to spend as much for an IDE as we might spend on a used car. I'm just a hobbyist PHP programmer, but I've created dozens of web sites from scratch in PHP, probably several hundred web pages, some of them quite complex, over the past 6 or 8 years, and I have never found a practical alternative to just writing the code. You can certainly get increased efficiency from "frameworks", although I have never used any of them. My advice would be to spend the time required to learn how to write PHP code, rather than spend the time (and money?) required to search for and then learn to use higher level design tools. That's from my perspective, of course, and others are sure to disagree.

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 4:18 am
by greyhoundcode
True it is expensive, I don't use it myself although I tried it out a while back.

The IDE builds on VCL for PHP, which might be described as a port of the normal (ie, Windows Forms) VCL that is used by regular Delphi. Anyway, VCL for PHP itself is open source and free to use should that be of interest.

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 9:43 am
by Bill H
califdon, you are hoplessly out of touch with modern practice, horribly old-fashioned, totally archaic, and absolutely correct.
I could not possibly agree with you more. You are, as the saying goes, "singing my song."

Re: Can There Be a PHP Drag & Drop GUI IDE?

Posted: Mon May 31, 2010 1:57 pm
by califdon
@BillH: :rofl: At my age, I have every right to be old-fashioned! Hey, good to see you active on here again. Just got your email, will respond when I wake up.