Cross-paltform Apps and PHP on the desktop

Lately I’ve been fiddeling  with cross-platform apps.

Cross-palform can be:

  • Android/iPhone on the mobile world
  • Windows/Linux/Mac on the desktop/laptop

I’ve been searching on both ends 🙂 but this post is about desktop.

Languages (make a google search on each) aside from the traditional Java, C++, C, Objective C:

D lang, Go lang, Free Pascal(fpc)/Lazarus – Native executables on each platform. Only lazarus gives you fast, simple cross-plaform GUI (Linux,Mac,Windows)

Development Environments for HTML based development:

PHPDesktop, Node-Webkit, nighttrain: These are funny products, you get an *.exe and a sub-folder “www” you then put some code made with Javascript, html, css, (and sometimes PHP,Python,Lua) on that folder. Then, when you launch that *.exe a window opens with a chrome browser frame showing your app. It’s pretty cool!

If you want to do something similar, you could be visit the embedded server mongoose (or a more free for comercial use fork civetweb) they used or the CEF3 (Chrome Embedded Framework).

Tip for node-webkit: Save persistent data in app

Web – Code editors (that use a similar technique as node-webkit)

IceCoder and Brackets

hero

Also: Adding LESS Css pre-processor to Brackets