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.

This recent article on the Redmond Developer News site looks at a partnership one of their largest local businesses, Microsoft, has with Zend and the work they're doing with PHP. They ask "what's next" for these two companies and their future of Microsoft in the community.

Despite speculation that Microsoft would make an announcement around its Silverlight runtime environment at last month's fourth annual Zend/PHP Conference and Expo (ZendCon) in Santa Clara, Calif., the company kept a relatively low profile.

They do mention the collaboration that Zend and Microsoft have already done and note that going forward there will be more initiative to get Windows and PHP to work even better for desktop applications.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial (by Jack Herrington) talking about working with Adobe AIR and Javascript to make a desktop application for uploading images (or any other files) to a remote server.

To solve the upload problem, most of the big services have dedicated upload applications that run on all the different platforms. But it takes a lot of work to develop them, especially when they have to run on both Macintosh and Windows. Or is it so tough? As it turns out, Adobe AIR technology makes it possible to write applications for any platform using just HTML and JavaScript. It also offers access to cool desktop features, notably drag and drop.

The tutorial shows how to make the application with the HTML/Javascript version of an AIR app (as opposed to Flex) that lets you drag and drop files into it to be uploaded. They make the basic file upload form first as a foundation then extend it to make it accept the remote request (via POST) from the AIR application to handle the uploads. Javascript code and screenshots are included.

The Developer Tutorial site has an introduction to PHP-GTK2 posted - an overview of what the new version (version 2) is and how you can install and use it to develop desktop applications.

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 PHP-GTK Community website has pointed out a small application, a cross-platform microblogging client called Nitwit.

Features include cross-platform functionality (Linux/Windows/Mac OSX), the ability to work on many protocols (like Jabber/Twitter/Jaiku) and it includes multilanguage support.

You can find out more about this simple little application on the Nitwit site as well as down load the latest version. There's also a discussion area that's been set up to allow developers and users to throw in their comments.

On the PHP-GTK Community site, there's this post from Janosch Graf about a PHP-GTK desktop project (a desktop environment inside of a PHP-GTK shell) called php-desktop.

php-desktop emulates a desktop using KDE programs/icons

php-desktop is tested with KDE. It also uses KDE programs (for example kde-open) and KDE icons. php-desktop gets the icon by the mimetype of a file. If the file is a desktop-file php-desktop gets the icon from there.

You can check out a screenshot of the project for a preview of what it's like or just download the archive and try it out for yourself.

In this new post to his blog, Richard Heyes talks about an example he's come across of PHP being used as backend behind a large marketing project:

I recently read an interesting example at Neil Shearing's internet marketing strategies blog of combining .NET desktop software with a PHP backend.

We all know PHP is often slated by "real programmers" as a scripting language only useful for kiddie's home pages, and its nice to see a serious marketer choosing PHP to power the backend to a serious piece of viral software with the potential to go load-mad.

Richard also points out some of his experience trying to market his software and which of his customers are the ones that would provide the most return (the ones looking for updates) and how he can gather their information more productively to further his project's goals.