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PHP Development Environment

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 1:31 pm
by Luke
Is there any good PHP environments that do not need you to be connected to any sort of server or run a server within themselves? Does that question even make sense? If so, how could I acquire such an environment?

Re: PHP Development Environment

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 1:39 pm
by Oren
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:Does that question even make sense?
Well... If it does, then not to me.
What do you mean? A local server maybe?

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 1:40 pm
by hawleyjr
Are you saying run PHP files on a machine with no server?

I think it would be pretty hard to take the 'server' out of 'server side scripting'

There was a desktop vs created sometime last year but I believe even that required the machine to be running the server...

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 1:48 pm
by RobertGonzalez
I didn't think a server-side, pre-processed scripting language could process without a server?

I know that Zend Studio can debug a script by running it through the php.exe file on a Windows system. So in that case, even without a server, it can still run, but it is not getting processed, just evaluated to static HTML. In order to see it, you have to choose to view the output in a browser.

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:06 pm
by Luke
it just seems to me that it would be possible to build a program that emulates a server to develop php inside of.

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:27 pm
by RobertGonzalez
I'm sure it's possible. It's just easier for most people to download Apache, install it and start parsing. At least I am of that opinion.

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:42 pm
by Oren
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:it just seems to me that it would be possible to build a program that emulates a server to develop php inside of.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this "program" be a server?

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:45 pm
by RobertGonzalez
I think a server (like httpd) serves up pages. A processing app (like PHP) processes code. The processor works on the server to serve up processed files. So what Ninja is talking about is an app to simulate the interaction between the processor and the server by way of the processor only. I think. :?

Re: PHP Development Environment

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:46 pm
by Christopher
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:Is there any good PHP environments that do not need you to be connected to any sort of server or run a server within themselves?
Do you have Apache/PHP installed on your local machine? If not that is the way to do it. Other programs then use the CLI PHP to do things like error checking. I know that PHPEclipse does error checking in the editor which is very handy to find the stupid missing parens and semi-colons type errors.

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 3:50 pm
by RobertGonzalez
There are a lot of editors that will do debugging by passing your script through php.exe (or whatever version of the executable you have on your machine). I know tsEditor does it, of course Zend Studio does it, PHPEdit (from waterproof software) does it. I think even notepad++ offers some form of debugging also. They don't use the server, they use the executable to process your script.

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 4:08 pm
by Weirdan
Ninja, you might want to take a look at NuSoap phpEd. It cames bundled with tiny http server just for debugging purposes. It's a decent IDE (yet I prefer vim + denwer, myself)

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 4:23 pm
by alex.barylski
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:it just seems to me that it would be possible to build a program that emulates a server to develop php inside of.
By server I am not sure what you mean...

Run PHP scripts without Apache?

Year it's easy...you pass your scripts to PHP CLI and it returns your output...

Your editor would then need to capture that CLI output (not difficult, but not trivial either) and send it to a web browser.

When I say web browser I don't mean an actual web browser, but rather the engine which drives a web browser...at the very least.

ie:
1) IE's IWebBrowser2/3
2) Mozilla's Gecko

In this sense, your application emulates a web server...and it becomes the direct responsibility of you application to determine which scripts get loaded and supply those scripts with GET/POST, etc data...

Are you building an IDE?

Cheers :)

Posted: Thu May 11, 2006 4:27 pm
by alex.barylski
Oren wrote:
The Ninja Space Goat wrote:it just seems to me that it would be possible to build a program that emulates a server to develop php inside of.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't this "program" be a server?
The application would become both the server and the client...yes...

The embedded HTMl rendering engine would be the client and the PHP CLI would be the server...