In a new post to the SitePoint PHP blog today editor Bruno Skvorc shares a summary of three ways to make desktop applications with PHP that will run across multiple platforms.

PHP as a cross-platform desktop app development language? Blasphemy! Nonetheless, it’s possible. A few years ago, everything those interested in bringing PHP to the desktop had had was the now long abandoned GTK PHP. Since then, new players have appeared, though let’s first answer the “why”.

He answers the "why" question with a list of "several far fetched scenarios" but points out that there's much better tools for the job. He then gets into the three different tools that can be used to make the desktop applications:

• Nightrain
• WxPHP
• TideSDK

He briefly introduces each, explores a bit of what they can do and looks at some of the major hinderances that come with them. He ends with a few links to other, less well-developed options like PHPDesktop, Webinder and PHP GTK.

Rob Aley pointed me towards a new ebook he's created that wants to help you understand what kinds of things PHP can do "beyond the web" and the usual web-based applications - PHP Beyond the Web.

Leverage your existing web based PHP skills to write all types of software. CLI scripts, desktop software, network servers and more - this book will give you the tools, techniques and background necessary to write just about any type of software you can think of, using the PHP you know.

The book covers topics like interactive shell scripts, system daemons and desktop software. It also looks at some more general development topics like licensing, deployment and system interactions. If this sounds interesting and you want a sample of the content, check out the table of contents or the sample chapter.

In a new post to his site Christian Weiske shares an update he contributed to the PHP_CodeSniffer functionality to make working with and checking the validity of local PHP code easier - a notifier for PHP_CodeSniffer using the "notify-send" commonly installed in most Linux distributions.

I use emacs as IDE, and wanted to have direct feedback about the validity of my .php files when writing them. The most easy way was to add a save hook that runs PHP_CodeSniffer - but the results should be displayed in a nice, unobtrusive way. phpcs has multiple reporting modes - xml, checkstyle, csv etc. - but nothing for the desktop. I thought that notify-send would be the right fit since it is able to display pretty popup messages without getting in the way.

He also includes the details on his original objective - including it in a "on save" hook as well as providing it in a keystroke shortcut, making checking his code even easier.

On the SaniSoft blog there's a new tutorial where Jatin Chimote introduces you to the world of building desktop applications with the help of the Appcelerator Titanium software.

The post is about creating desktop applications with the help of PHP. And No, we are not using PHP-GTK. You can now create desktop applications without learning a completely new programming language! That is with the help of a free and open source tool called "Titanium". Whats more you will use your existing CSS and Javascript and PHP knowledge.

They introduce the different parts of the Titanium platform - the Desktop SDK, Mobile SDK and Developer tools - as well as explaining what it takes to use them and what you'll need to download to follow along. They take you step-by-step through the process (complete with screenshots) of making a basic "currency converter" application using the Exchange API to to the heavy lifting.

Robert Basic has a new post to his blog talking about a new PHP editor/IDE that he's been working on called ape.

I’m writing web applications each and every day, so writing a desktop app requires a different way of thinking and leaving my "comfort zone" (although, I'm quite comfortable in front of the keyboard hackin' away code). ape is written in python and pyqt, but again, it’s not about the language used, for me it is about programming.

He's used vim and Netbeans in the past, but didn't quite find what he was looking for, so he started up this project to both learn a different sort of development and hopefully end up with something that does what he needs: grouping files into projects, regex search/replace, code coloring & completion and, of course, file editing

You can find the latest on the ever-evolving project on github.

On the php|architect blog today Giorgio Sironi takes a look at the state of PHP 5.3 support both on the developer and on the server side and how well it's being adopted.

PHP 5.3 introduced namespaces and anonymous functions to the PHP world, which are surely great innovations for this programming language. For PHP 5.3 to be widely used, however, it needs to be supported by the various operating systems installed on development boxes and servers.

He talks about the three major platforms when it comes to web development and serving - Linux, Windows and OS X - and how easy it is to get this latest version of PHP up and running on each. He also briefly touches on the differences in adoption from the two halves of the development process - desktop versus server.

According to this article in The Register, more PHP developers (of the ones polled by Zend) prefer to do their actual development on a Windows platform, but still host their sites on something like Linux (as shown in the results of a Zend survey).

In a recent study from Zend Technologies, forty two per cent of PHP programmers named Windows as their primary development operating system. Linux came second, with 38.5 per cent, while Mac's OS X was third on 19.1 per cent. Zend did not say how many developers it spoke to, but called the December poll a "global survey" ranging from independent consultants to organizations with more than 5,000 employees.

The same survey shows that the choice of Linux for the server is still strong, and that the rest of the options (Windows, OS X) are trailing by a large percentage. You can read Zend's official press release on the survey on PRWeb.net.

On the ThinkPHP blog today there's a new post looking at one of the better offerings for making desktop applications with the web-related skills you already know - CodeStrong (as a part of the Appcelerator/Titanium project).

Looking how to develop a desktop application in a short term, I came accross "Titanium Developer". This Open-Source tool helps you to create desktop apps. The special feature about it is the possibility to use well-known Web-Technologies such as HTML, JavaScript and PHP. Thus, learning a new programming language is no longer necessary. Another advantage is that you can directly create binaries for Mac, Linux and Windows using the same code.

They look at some example code to create a basic "Hello World" kind of tool and show how PHP can be embedded directly into the code, as made possible by the native PHP support introduced from contributions from people like Ben Ramsey.

On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial by Richard Bates that will walk you through the creation of a simple time tracking application that combines the Adobe Air and PHP technologies to make a simple desktop client.

The scenario calls for a lightweight, cross-platform desktop application that does its job and stays out of the users' way. It also needs a powerful management interface that can be accessed from anywhere. To address both needs, you first create a desktop application for AIR that leverages PHP back-end services for persistent storage and extra horsepower. Then, you create a simple and quick PHP/Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) browser-based interface for management and output applications.

The Air client is really just a frontend to the PHP backend located on the server (so there's no need to install PHP locally too). The system is based around a few objects - the Client, a Project, a time-tracking Ticket and an Invoice for the time spent. To make things simpler, he uses an instance of the Zend Framework to do most of the heavy lifting on the backend.

The rest of this article sets up the backend scripts - creating the service interface and making some of the initial methods (like getClients and logIn). The next part in the series will get into the actual Air application.

Frederic Marnad has linked to a few other articles about PHP-GTK from the PHP-GTK Community blog today:

• A guide to building out PHP-GTK with the pre-release version of PHP6
• A new introduction to PHP-GTK (with example code)
• An article on DeveloperTutorials.com on building desktop PHP applications

You can find more great PHP-GTK related content and links to tutorials and other sites on the PHP-GTK Community site's main page.