The four most interesting alternative uses for PHP are as a command-line scripting language, a cross-platform graphical user interface system, a games engine, and as a host for our own language - we will be looking at all three of these here. Due to a lack of support for various applications on Windows, several parts of both the command-line scripting section and the graphical user interfaces chapter will not work outside of a Unix environment.
Users of Cygwin may be able to circumvent this problem - problems and possible solutions are mentioned where appropriate. In the games section, the graphical games library for Unix is much more advanced than that for Windows, but, so as to help the largest audience, we use the slightly older cross-platform code only.
Want to learn PHP 7?
Hacking with PHP has been fully updated for PHP 7, and is now available as a downloadable PDF. Get over 1200 pages of hands-on PHP learning today!
If this was helpful, please take a moment to tell others about Hacking with PHP by tweeting about it!
Next chapter: Command-line scripting >>
Previous chapter: Alternative PHP uses
Jump to:
Home: Table of Contents
Copyright ©2015 Paul Hudson. Follow me: @twostraws.