PHP-GTK 2.0.0 Released (finally)
For those of you who didn’t know – PHP-GTK 2 finally hit a final 2.0.0 release (on leapday of all things). PHP-GTK is a wrapper around GTK, a cross platform library for creating desktop applications. With it you can write desktop apps with PHP. That means no server, just a PHP CLI, the GTK libraries, and the PHP-GTK extension on the computer you want to run the application on. Remember, PHP-GTK doesn’t change the way PHP works underneath, it just means you write the frontend with gtk widgets instead of html.
So go download your copy and replace your old installations! The windows builds are now “unzip and run” – with support for the windows theme “out of the box”. It also includes GTK version 2.12.8 which means enhanced functionality and stability on windows (and a shiny new Tangoesque icon theme). Everything you need is in the download, you don’t have to change anything (except possibly the php-cli.ini included, or add additional non-thread safe PHP extensions from the PHP downloads page). The libglade and gtksourceview extensions are also included in the binary build, the other PHP-GTK extensions (libsexy, gtkspell, and others) don’t have current libraries at the moment, because the windows build is currently created with “stock” GTK libraries. If I have time (and get some projects finished) I’ll throw the libraries I have into MinGW and build the additional extensions – and the librsvg pixbuf loader (why isn’t that in stock builds?)
On the “todo” list is building the gtk dependency chain on MSVC (instead of using the MinGW built ones provided by GTK). The purpose of that is stability building against PHP, which is an MSVC build not a MinGW build. In addition PHP would like to move to newer MSVC compilers at some point, so the dependent libraries have to build differently as well.
There has been a lot of functionality added and support for newer GTK libs added, however the library is still not 100% feature complete. We need developers! If you have any experience with C and don’t mind getting walked through how to create overrides (most of the PHP-GTK2 code is generated…with PHP), we’d love to have you. Finally I leave you with a list of great resources on PHP-GTK.
#php-gtk channel on freenode
http://oops.opsat.net – Linux php-gtk installer, tutorials
http://php-gtk.eu – Community site, help
http://www.kksou.com/php-gtk2/ – Lots of tutorials and code
http://gnope.org – PLEASE DO NOT USE THE INSTALLER UNTIL IT IS UPDATED TO THE LATEST PHP_GTK2 VERSION!! , but the forums are a great place for information and the channel has some nice applications.
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:53 am
[...] case you need these two libraries, you can get the libraries from Elizabeth Smith’s blog. (Note: she’s the one who compiled the windows binary in the official php-gtk [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
[...] bloggers are also happy about the news including Elizabeth Smith and the PHP-GTK Community [...]
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:31 pm
[...] bloggers are also happy about the news including Elizabeth Smith and the PHP-GTK Community [...]
March 4th, 2008 at 3:55 am
[...] case you need this library, you can get the libraries from Elizabeth Smith’s blog. (Note: she’s the one who compiled the windows binary in the official php-gtk [...]