PHP Programming Language - Cultural View

PHP-GTK 207
PHP-GTK
Developer(s) Andrei Zmievski
Stable release 2.0.1 / May 16, 2008
Operating
system
Cross-platform
Type Language binding
License GNU Lesser General Public License
Website http://gtk.php.net/
PHP-GTK is a set of language bindings for PHP which allow GTK+ GUI applications to be written in PHP.
PHP-GTK provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions.
History
PHP-GTK was originally conceived by Andrei Zmievski, who is also actively involved in the development of PHP
and the Zend Engine. The idea was received well by the PHP community, and more people started to get involved
with the project. James Moore and Steph Fox were among the first to join in, contributing a great deal to PHP-GTK
through their documentation efforts, and Frank Kromann - also from the PHP development team - supplied Windows
binaries for the project.
The first version of PHP-GTK was released in March 2001. More people began to get involved, and several
extensions were contributed introducing new widgets, such as Scintilla and GtkHTML [1] . PHP-GTK 1.0 was
released in October 2003 alongside several extensions — including a wrapper for libglade, which allowed the
cross-platform Glade UI builder to be used in creating PHP-GTK applications.
Present
PHP-GTK was quickly adopted by the PHP community. Several applications were developed, and a small job
market even emerged. Zmievski and Fox are still working hard on the project, with Fox now maintaining PHP-GTK
for Windows.
Development is in full swing for the next major version of PHP-GTK. PHP-GTK 2 fully utilizes PHP 5's powerful
object model support, and brings the improved portability of GTK 2.6 as well as its new set of widgets. The project
also has some new extensions such as GtkSourceView, which provides a rich source editor widget, alongside some
of the old favourites.
Documentation for PHP-GTK 2 is filling out rapidly. Several articles and tutorials have been written on the topic,
and around half the classes have been fully documented. Scott Mattocks, an active member of the PHP-GTK
documentation group, has also written a book on the subject of PHP-GTK programming. [2]