Building Desktop Applications in PHP

By Akash Mehta
2008-02-09


Benefits of desktop development

There are a number of benefits to desktop development, from technical advantages to fundamental benefits. Here are some reasons why you should be developing desktop applications.

Technical advantages

There are a number of basic technical advantages to desktop-based applications. They can interact with the local filesystem, allowing settings to be saved on the user’s computer, files to be retrieved and manipulated, databases to be stored and so on. They generally integrate with the GUI toolkit of the operating system, providing a UI style that the user is familiar with – users are still getting used to the web application interfaces of our web 2.0 applications. And finally, they use consistent interfaces, unlike the hope-for-the-best approach to writing HTML, allowing for complex UI elements.

Fundamental advantages

However, perhaps most importantly, they are geared to user-driven applications, especially where the user has content to share. Web applications can easily bring users together, for effective sharing of information. Desktop applications, on the other hand, can easily work with the user and manage information, especially when there is no need to share that information.

Gaming is an excellent example; interface and graphics issues aside, games are built around the user, and as a result work very well on the desktop. Image editing is another; despite the availability of online Photoshop alternatives, everything at the higher end of image editing is still squarely on the desktop. Sure, there's Flickr, but Flickr is more geared towards the sharing of photos and basic editing.

As a result, if you're considering building an application that fits into one of these categories, and you've currently got a web application in mind, a desktop application is definitely worth considering.

Tutorial Pages:
» Introduction
» Fundamentals
» Benefits of desktop development
» Building desktop applications in PHP
» Further reading

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