From Leon Pegg on the PHP-GTK Community site:

I have been working on the php-gtk documentation the last few weeks. I finally have an updated version of the manual. Unfortunately its not on the main site gtk.php.net, so I have uploaded it here: leonpegg.com/php-gtk-doc

The manual includes tutorials, the actual reference guide and an appendix of details on terms/other information.

PHP-GTK 2 is out, and with it, a fantastic means for PHP developers to build useful, reliable cross-platform desktop applications. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to get up and running with PHP-GTK in no time and build your first desktop application.

They look at qhat it is, getting started with it and making your first application (a simple little "Hello World" output box). They also point out some of the demos you can grab as examples and show you how to make something a little more powerful - a window with an input form that generates an md5 hash.

The site offers "geo-nick", a simplistic API to obtain this [latitude and longitude] information coupled with the optional IRC nick field, to allow any developer to create mashups showing community PHP-GTK developers, as identified by nickname (no actual name information is made available through this API) on a map.

The post includes an example of how to use the API - what package to call and what the message should contain. The results are passed back in an array of nickname, lataitude, longitude.

Piggybacking on this new service, they also have a new tutorial showing how to access and use this service from a simple PHP-GTK2 application. It just grabs the results and dumps them into a simple text area in a window.

Don't look at me like that, I haven't lost my mind. It's not really a framework in the traditional MVC web application sense. Instead it's a group of fairly loosely coupled widgets and classes with an emphasis on clean code.

With the help of several singletons, multiple widgets and a modular structure, the Callicore Desktop makes working with this parts as simple as calling it on the command line (with limited setup). If you'd like to get a look at the current version of the framework, check out the Callicore site or just head straight to the code.

No, I'm not insane. And I realize that there are some great resources for downloading precompiled ready to go PHP windows binaries and extensions. However, I've been working with PHP-GTK2, and writing C code. I wanted to be able to test new things being placed in CVS and learn enough C to help increase the implementation percentage.

She breaks the process up into the four logical steps for getting it up and running:

• Setup a (free as in money, not beer) compile environment
• Compile PHP
• Compile PHP-GTK2
• Deploy PHP-GTK2

I like the idea of taking something that is normally web based and putting it on the user's desktop. This way things can be made a little more intuitive and comfortable for the user because the application isn't constrained by the web browser any more.

Some of the features included already are:

• putting together a batch of work orders while offline and sending them when connected again
• pull down work order data
• close work orders
• get and add notes

Articles in this issue include:

• Anant Narayanan's look at development in PHP-GTK 2 (cover story)
• Eric Angel's tutorial on using random images in form validation
• Stefan Priebsch's thoughts on code structure and refactoring
• and, of course, the Security Corner (with Chris Shiflett) and Test Pattern (with Jeff Moore) columns

You can either order a single issue or get a year's subscription of this great publication. The issue costs about $4.20 USD and the full year only comes in at $35.40 USD.