In a new post, Elizabeth Smith talks about "perverting Windows" to work with desktop PHP applications via an interesting library - Winbinder.

Writing desktop applications with PHP is considered to be idiotic by many people, but personally I think it's a lot of fun and can be useful. [...] There are more solutions for desktop apps with PHP than people probably realize. [...] So why isn't there a Win32 GUI wrapper for PHP? Well, there is...kind of.

She mentions a few issues she has with the Winbinder software - including lacking support for PHP5 and non-threadsafe code. She's falling back more and more on the "I can write an extension for that" mentality, though and has plans for the future:

Eventually I hope to have a WinUi, WinGdi, and WinSys (processes, threading, registry, et al) to put in pecl. There are some win32 only extensions in PECL, but win32std is the only one I've actually had use for, or even got working properly, and there's no agreement among them in naming convention, API design, or even functions vs. classes. So here I am, playing.