PHP for desktop apps

Luis_Osorio

Hi,

I've been studying PHP for a while and i am working on a site development with PHP. Since i am rather new to PHP i want to ask if you guys think it is viable to write database apps for desktop computers using the browser as interface with the user, that is, building a html/php to run in local pc's (with apache and mysql) as it was a web site.

Thanks

Luis

_SuperString

Yes, Why not... Lets face it PHP/MySQL is cheap and chearful and sounds like it can do the job you need it to. So I say go for it.

eoghain

I hope you aren't considering having Apache and MySQL running on the users machine? What a headache that would be to setup and keep running properly in a desktop environment.

Other than that this is a fine idea as long as you can manage the data properly with only a stateless connection. Think of 2 users trying to modify the same record at the same time, how would you handle this? I've found that PHP is a great language for serving up alot of database information, but when it comes to having an interactive database the stateless environment starts to loose its luster. I'm not saying that it can't be done (just look at the message board sites like this one) but if you will have users interacting with the same datasets it can get very sticky.

knelson

I would second the motion of eoghain, and beware of the datasets that you're going to be using. I'm developing a workflow management web app right now, and it's important to be mindful of the db transactions involved. Be sure to check out the features of some MySQL versions that allow locking, etc., and see if that environment is going to really hold up.