Extensionless PHP Graphic User Interface library

Table of Contents

• Why
• Requirements
• Usage
• Documentation
• How it works
• Contributors Guide
• TO-DO
• Credits
• License

Why

PHP can be more than a "Web Language", it's a fast language, with a cross platform interpreter and a good CLI. GUI is a natural step for completing this ecosystem.

For many years, GUI projects are being developed for PHP, like PHP-GTK, PHP-QT, wxPHP and so many others, but none of them became popular.

This project aims to solve the most common problems of existing "GUI Projects":

• The need for installing an extension
• Cross platform
• No external dependencies
• Easy to install (composer require php-gui) / Easy to use ($button = new Button)

Requirements

The following PHP versions are supported:

• PHP 5.6
• PHP 7
• HHVM

And OS:

• Linux x64
• Windows x64
• Mac OSX (tested on 10.10.x and 10.11.x)

Usage

Download the library using composer:

$ composer require gabrielrcouto/php-gui

Now, you can build a GUI application. Let's do a Hello World!

Create the file 'myapp.php':

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Gui\Application;
use Gui\Components\Button;

$application = new Application();

$application->on('start', function() use ($application) {
    $button = (new Button())
        ->setLeft(40)
        ->setTop(100)
        ->setWidth(200)
        ->setValue('Look, I\'m a button!');

    $button->on('click', function() use ($button) {
        $button->setValue('Look, I\'m a clicked button!');
    });
});

$application->run();

Now, run it:

php myapp.php

Simple? 👏 You don't need to compile anything, just download the library via composer and use it! 😄

Documentation

We have a Documentation Page

But, if you want to see some examples, just follow the instructions below.

# clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/gabrielrcouto/php-gui.git
cd php-gui

# install dependencies
composer install

# run examples
php examples/01-basic/example.php
php examples/02-animation/example.php
php examples/03-window/example.php
php examples/04-multiple-windows/example.php
php examples/05-canvas/example.php
php examples/06-ping/example.php
php examples/07-php-internals/example.php

How it works

To create a GUI without the need for an extension, PHP executes a binary with proc_open and communicates with it using Stdin/Stdout Pipes--it's a fast and cross platform solution.

PHP <=> Stdin/Stdout Pipes <=> Lazarus Application <=> GUI

The binary is created using Lazarus (Free Pascal). After much research, I found a large advantage by using Lazarus over other desktop languages (like C#, Java...):

It doesn't have any dependencies (except for Linux, which needs GTK), has a good component library, is compiled, open source and has a nice slogan (Write Once, Compile Anywhere).

The communication (IPC) between PHP and Lazarus is performed using a protocol based on JSON RPC. You can view the specification here.

Contributors Guide

Components names

To be an easy to use library, this project will use HTML friendly names for the components, as PHP developers are more familiar with it.

Examples:

• On Lazarus, the property "caption" is for the text of a button. On php-gui, the property name is "value".
• On Lazarus, "Edit" is the component for text input, on php-gui, it's "InputText".

Compiling Lazarus App

On your Local Machine

First, you need to install Lazarus.

For compiling the lazarus binary:

lazbuild phpgui.lpr

Using Docker

If you are generating the Linux binary, you can use Docker:

lazarus/linux-docker.sh
cd lazarus/
lazbuild phpgui.lpr

Test

First install the dependencies, and after you can run:

bin/phing

TO-DO

The "Issues" page from this repository is being used for TO-DO management, just search for the "to-do" tag.

Credits

@gabrielrcouto

@reisraff

License

MIT License