PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that enables you to write client-side cross-platform GUI applications. This is the first such extension of this kind and one of the goals behind it was to prove that PHP is a capable general-purpose scripting language that is suited for more than just Web applications.

The full source can be found and forked/cloned over on github and is just waiting for you to contribute!

es, you read it right, GTK+, the Gnome Toolkit library, normally used to create desktop applications, can now be used to serve the same applications via the Web to a browser that supports HTML 5 canvas objects. PHP-GTK is a PHP extension that uses the GTK+ library to build PHP desktop applications. So it can eventually benefit for this GTK library enhancements to build PHP-GTK based applications that can be served over the Web to HTML 5 browsers.

Manuel starts by explaining a bit about what PHP-GTK (and GTK+) is and a recent update to GTK+ that allows it to generate output to different backends - Wayland (direct graphics rendering) and Broadway (HTML5 canvas support). There's no example code to go along with the post, but there's a good description of how the output of an X Windows session could be pulled in and displayed in a browser (see this video for a cool example using GIMP and Broadway).

This document does not care about what distribution you use, these instructions will work on all shapes of Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. It is up to you to translate any line into the required line for your distribution. I will however tell you right now, if you are on Ubuntu and never done this before, you are missing pretty much every package you need.

There is one platform that there's not instructions for, though - Windows. All of the other major platforms are presented. Tools needed to compile your own setup include Autotools, the usual make tools, GTK+, a recent version of PHP (5.2 or higher) and LibGlade.

So I've been using microsoft visual studio (actually it's Visual C++ Express, but uses the same stuff behind the scenes) to work on getting things compiled on windows. PHP-Gtk2 allows for some nifty extensions, well at least on linux. So I've been working to get versions of libglade, scintilla, gtksourceview and mozembed working on windows. It's a long, slow process. Here's the deal so far.

She talks about her current situation (what's compiling and what's not) and the software that she's trying to get up and running. She also mentions a problem she's been having with an error message talking about "unresolved external symbols" she'll need to track down (or get some help on - anyone out there seen it?)