I attended yesterday the Boston PHP Meetup (User Group) meeting for August.
Scott Mattocks introduced the basic concepts of PHP-GTK 2. He gave a well researched sample application using PHP and the Gimp Toolkit (GTK). The application queried an online database of events. His presentation went from from an empty window to the mostly functioning application with query form and result page.
Following his presentation we had a lively discussion about features such as long running tasks and complex widgets. Scott also assessed the learning curve as being a bit steeper than HTML forms but not as steep as Swing for example.
Finally we wondered "When would you use this kind of interface instead of plain server logic and HTML in a browser?" We figured that applications with sophisticated interaction patterns or requiring access to local data/databases would be best suited for PHP applications with an GTK interface. The caveat appears to be that there is limitations in deployment. The currently best method is deploying PHP, the libraries and the GTK one at a time. An alternative is emerging in Gnope, the PHP application installer.
Some lucky dudes took home Scott Mattocks book "Pro PHP-GTK" and T-Shirts. also many thanks to Optaros for hosting.
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