Category Archives: Software

PHP development odds and ends

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The Eclipse framework is an open source development platform used mainly by Java and C developers. They do have a PHP Development Tools framework, which allows Eclipse to be used to develop PHP with. Version 1 was released 18/9/7 and there have been regular releases since 8/3/6.

Phalanger is a PHP compiler for the dot Net framework. What it does is compile PHP scripts and odds and ends into .net readable format, so you can run your PHP scripts directly from any .net compatible platform. Development has been quite rapid on this, but seems to be running out of steam with 121 issues still outstanding. The last nightly build was 21/9/7 and the last release on 20/5/7. Get going again, this one is great!

Roadsend PHP Compiler is a free open source native compiler for the PHP language. It compiles PHP source code to stand alone, native binaries which do not require an interpreter. Roadsend Compiler can build online web applications with Fast/CGI, offline web applications with an embedded web server (MicroServer), desktop GUI applications with PHP-GTK, and console applications. It is available on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.

PHC-WIN is a windows application that allows one to create EXEs from PHP code. The PHP code is first converted to PHP bytecode using bcompiler, and then embedded into an EXE using embeder. Compiling the code into bytecode has two benefits: it speeds up load times since the PHP code doesn’t have to be interpreted, and it obfuscates the code so that it cannot be easily reverse engineered.

PHC-WIN itself is written in PHP and utilizes wbObjects, my object oriented layer for WinBinder to create windows controls.

Bambalam PHP EXE Compiler/Embedder is a free command line tool to convert PHP applications to standalone Windows .exe applications. The exe files produced are totally standalone, no need for php dlls etc. The php code is encoded using the Turck MMCache Encode library so it’s a perfect solution if you want to distribute your application while protecting your source code. The converter is also suitable for producing .exe files for windowed PHP applications (created using for example the WinBinder library). It’s also good for making stand-alone PHP Socket servers/clients (using the php_sockets.dll extension).

PHP compilers

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So far as I can find out there are two PHP compilers out there:

Zend Guard, which compiles your code so that it’s optimised, sped up and unreadable. This is run using an Apache / IIS extension called the Zend Optimiser (free).

Phalanger, which is open source and compiles to .NET, allowing the use of .NET classes. It runs on top of the .NET 2.0 framework, so you can run your PHP scripts directly on microsoft windows machines without installing PHP.

Quercus: PHP in Java

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Quercus is Caucho Technology’s fast, open-source, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language. Quercus is a feature of Caucho Technology’s Resin Application Server and is built into Resin – there is no additional download/install. Developers using Resin can launch PHP projects without having to install the standard PHP interpreter (http://www.php.net) as Quercus takes on the role of the PHP engine.
What is Quercus

Quercus implements PHP 5 and is internationalization/localization (i18n/l10n) aware. Quercus natively supports Unicode and the new Unicode syntax of the up-and-coming PHP 6. Quercus implements a growing list of PHP extensions (i.e. APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, Postgres, etc.). Many popular PHP applications will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, WordPress, and XOOPS.

Gaia Online new form of social networking

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Gaia online is a mix of an MMO (people have Avatars and can walk around in a virtual, Manga-esque world, but there are no ‘enemies’), forums, media and ways to improve your avatar. You get gold by being social – ie. posting on the forums, exploring the world or uploading content.
The subscriber base has doubled from 1m to 2m in the past month.
It’s aimed squarely at teenagers and looks like a very promising concept.

Experimental Flash Sites

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These sites have news, information and techniques for doing weird stuff in Flash. Some very cool stuff in there.

http://www.levitated.net/
http://www.chewinggumfortheeyes.com/
http://www.nanolabs.net/
http://www.ultrashock.com/
http://www.gotoandlearn.com/