Wyome.com has this new post today with a little note about a handy piece of software for the Windows users out there, an interactive PHP "shell".

Elisa Manara and Salvatore Sanfilippo have put together an interesting little application called PHP Interactive

PHP Interactive is a simple PHP program that lets the user to write code in a text area (actually multiple text areas, with tabs to switch), and see the output of the code just pressing the update button. The scripts are persistent, and the program supports a raw and html output mode, in order to see the raw script output or to interpret it as html.

He brings up the point of usefulness - what kind of situations might this work best in - but I'm not so sure it would really help out all that much than besides with common tasks. You'd really have to have something more advanced, almost a mini web server with a text input, to do anything really useful with it on a client side. Otherwise, you're just using it for things like text or XML transformation with procedural code...