With the announcement of the PHP-GTK 2 Alpha release, PHP-GTK News will be going on a short break so that I can focus on a few higher priority items (namely work). Until the return of the news, anyone who wishes to stay up to date with all of the latest PHP-GTK happenings should subscribe to the PHP-GTK mailing lists or sign on to the #php-gtk channel on IRC. See http://gtk.php.net/resources.php for more details.
The PHP-GTK team is pleased to announce the release of PHP-GTK 2.0.0alpha.
This is the first release of PHP-GTK 2. PHP-GTK 2 is a PHP extension that combines the power and flexibility of both PHP 5 and GTK+ 2 to allow developers to create stand-alone desktop GUI applications using PHP.
This is a preview release that should be used only with the understanding that the software may contain bugs and that certain minor features may need to be adjusted before the final release. We encourage widespread testing and feedback via the PHP-GTK development mailing list.
PHP-GTK 2.0.0alpha can be downloaded from the PHP-GTK website: http://gtk.php.net/download.php
Users looking for help with the new release are encouraged to read the PHP-GTK 2 manual or contact the PHP-GTK General mailing list.
Another slow week for PHP-GTK. It appears that development efforts have fallen off as yet another week has passed while we wait for an initial alpha release. But, that doesn’t mean that nothing has happened. Here are the headlines for the week of June 28th through July 5th.
Read on for the details…
Development
Development patches this week:
Scintilla UTF-8 Issues Resolved:
Anant applied a patch this week that helps GtkScintilla handle text of different encodings properly. It converts text from UTF-8 to the needed encoding before applying it to the Scintilla widget.
Documentation
Documentation Updates:
The week of June 21st through the 28th was a rather quite week for PHP-GTK. There was actually a lot of chatter on the development mailing list but most of it didn’t lead to any news items.
Anyway, here are the headlines for this week:
Read on for the details…
Development
More Patches:
GdkPixmap::add_alpha() - allows a developer to add an alpha channel to a pixmap
GdkPixmap::create_from_xpm() - creates a pixmap from an XPM file. XPMs are images similar to ascii art, where each character represents a color.
GdkPixmap::create_from_xpm_d() - creates a pixmap from XPM data in memory.
General
A/R/T article:
The third article, “Managing Layout in PHP-GTK 2″, in PHP|Architect’s A/R/T series on PHP-GTK 2 is now available. This article talks about how to manage layout in PHP-GTK 2. It goes into the relationships between parents and children and shows how to create a flexible UI that maintains its appearance no matter what the user does to the main window.
PHP-GTK 1.x App released for OSX:
Ben Smith has released an application which sets up a PHP-GTK 1.x environment on Mac OSX. It provides the base needed for PHP-GTK applications to run on OSX. He offers a package with instructions for building the environment or a php_gtk.so module for download. For more details see: http://chico.benjamindsmith.com/phpgtk_osx/
NYPHP Presentation:
Scott Mattocks (who apparently like to talk about himself in the third person) gave a presentation this week to the New York PHP user’s group about PHP-GTK 2. The talk focused on introducing the group to the capabilities of PHP-GTK 2. It covered the main topics or PHP-GTK 2 developement: parent/child relationships, events & signals, model/view architecture, and customizing the look and feel. The presentation can be found online at: http://crisscott.com/talks/introPHPGTK2.html
He will presenting again at the Long Island PHP user’s group meeting in late July and at the Boston PHP user’s group meeting in early August.
IRC
Additions to GxLib:
Marc Quinton has expanded on his GxLib package to provide more examples of its capabilities. The new package includes three more games: Snake, Reversi Color, and Tetris.
The next article, “Managing Layout with PHP-GTK 2″, in the PHP-GTK 2 series on PHP|Architect’s A/R/T article repository is available.
One of the hardest parts about getting started with PHP-GTK is understanding how to properly layout the user interface. It can be very frustrating to finally get an application laid out just right, only to see it horribly disfigured when the user expands or shrinks the window. Part III of this series focuses on how to manage the relationships between parents and children in such a way that the application behaves well no matter what the user does to the window.
The full article can be found at PHP|Architect.
