Extensionless PHP Graphic User Interface library.

ALPHA - Please, don't use it for production.

Why
Installation
Requirements
Documentation
How it works
Contributors Guide
TO-DO
Credits

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 of installing an extension
Cross platform
No external dependencies
Easy to install (compose require php-gui) / Easy to use ($button = new Button)

Installation

Using composer:

$ composer require gabrielrcouto/php-gui

Requirements

The following PHP versions are supported:

PHP 5.6
PHP 7
HHVM

And OS:

Linux x64 (x86 will be supported)
Windows
Mac OSX

Documentation

We are developing the first stable version to write a good documentation. You can use the examples (see the examples folder of this repository) while we are finishing the first release.

Basic Application:

require 'vendor/autoload.php';

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

$application = new Application();

$application->on('start', function() use ($application) {
    $button = new Button();
    $button->left    = 40;
    $button->top     = 100;
    $button->width   = 200;
    $button->value   = 'Look, I\'m a button!';

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

$application->run();

How it works

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

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

The binary is made using Lazarus (Free Pascal). After a big research, I found a good advantage of Lazarus over other desktop languages (like C#, Java...):

It doesn't have any dependencies (ok, on Linux 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 made using a protocol based on JSON RPC. You can see 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" (like HTML).
On Lazarus, "Edit" is the component for text input, on php-gui, it's "InputText".

Compiling Lazarus App

First, you need to install Lazarus. For compiling the lazarus binary:

lazbuild phpgui.lpr

For generating the Linux binary, you can use Docker:

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

TO-DO

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

Credits

@gabrielrcouto

pokemaobr/php-gui