Your PC can be turned into a fully capable Web development environment, by installing those three technologies, and configuring them so they communicate with one another. Admittedly, you can simply install and use PHP for its command-line processing. But for creating and testing dynamically generated Web pages on your local machine, then Apache needs to be already installed and working.

If you're wanting to set that part up before you get started and aren't sure how, check out the other tutorial to get started. He works through the process with you, including screenshots of the installer and how to toss MySQL in to the mix.

Our client is looking for a consultant to start asap for a 3-6 month contract opening starting asap for a GUI developer:

Description:

Senior Software Engineer with 5+ years of experience in web application development, specifically on the client GUI side. A good candidate would have strong technical and communication skills with the ability to work independently and in a team environment. Must be able to translate requirements into detailed design specifications and drive the development to completion - including implementation, unit testing, integration, testing, and so on.

Responsibilities:

You will be responsible for the client side of theclient's monitoring and management software. This entails new designs and making enhancements to existing software.

Technical Requirements:

• Must be strong in UI (look-and-feel) design
• 3+ years using PHP, HTML, CSS, Java Script
• Web Services
• Strong SQL with Oracle

Desirable are MySQL, Perl, UNIX scripting, Java Having System administration experience is a plus.

There's no need to install a server and PHP and then try to coordinate them in order to get them to work together. Script GUI comes in one compact package. It includes a server, which is only available to the built-in browser and is a nice security feature. In addition, it supports CGI, virtual hosts, directory aliases, custom error documents and understands most commands in .htaccess files.

He tell how it works (pretty much just install and go) and how it can be configured to work with virtual hosts. Best of all, it already comes with the latest version of PHP for Windows and can interface with several of the popular databases out there.

The list is made up of:

• Crimson Editor
• VS.php
• ez_sql/ez_results - mysql wrapper library
• Smarty Template Engine mysql gui bundle 5.0

There's also a link to a post on the Zend Developer Zone on the topic from a comment. Apparently, it's related to the idea of rapid application development, and this presentation is linked to in a comment on the Zend site. It shows an editor that allows the user to work within a GUI component model based development environment to create a simple dynamic page that loads database data into an HTML table, complete with "back" and "forward" links.

PHP-Qt is an extension for PHP5 that aims to write software with the Qt Toolkit. It provides an object-oriented interface to the Qt4 Framework and allowes to write Qt applications in the PHP language.

Qt by Trolltech is a C++ toolkit for cross-platform GUI application development. Qt provides single-source portability across Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, all major commercial Unix variants, and embedded Linux.

Their first (and latest) release, version 0.0.1, has been posted and is ready for some testing. You need to have PHP 5.1RC1 or later to get it working (as well as the Qt4 development files, of course), but it looks like it has some good potential...]]> Fri, 02 Dec 2005 07:18:44 -0600