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noccy80 / wxphp

Build cross-platform software with rich native GUIs using the combined power of the PHP language and the wxWidgets library.

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Site: http://wxphp.org/

Table of Contents

Introduction

wxPHP stands for "wxwidgets for PHP" and it is a binding for the great cross-platform library wxWidgets used to develop GUI applications. The purpose is to bring all the facilities available on PHP as easyness of programming to assist on the development of cross-platform desktop applications. The syntax used is very similar to the one used on original implementation of wxWidgets C++, making it easier for people already familiar with the library.

Building on Windows

Requirements

  • Windows SDK 6.1
  • Visual C++ 2010 Express Edition
  • wxWidgets 2.9.4
  • PHP5 Sources
  • wxPHP source code
  • Read the README_MSW

Install Windows SDK 6.1 and Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition

  1. Windows SDK 6.1 download links:
  1. Visual Studio download link:

Download and install wxWidgets 2.9.4

  1. Checkout svn sources:

     svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/tags/WX_2_9_4 wxWidgets

  2. Open Windows SDK 6.1 CMD Shell:

     setenv /release /x86 /xp
 cd wxWidgets_Installation_Path
 cd build\msw
 nmake -f makefile.vc BUILD=release

Download and Install PHP sources

NOTE: Compilation has been tested against PHP 5.3 and 5.4 it should work with any 5.3.x - 5.4.x version of php

  1. Download PHP 5:

  1. Create the directory:

     c:\php-sdk

  2. Download PHP 5 binary tools:

  1. Extract the binary tools inside the directory c:\php-sdk leaving you with:

     c:\php-sdk\bin
 c:\php-sdk\script

  2. Open the Windows SDK 6.1 CMD Shell and do the following:

     setenv /release /x86 /xp
 cd c:\php-sdk\
 bin\phpsdk_setvars.bat
 bin\phpsdk_buildtree.bat php53dev

  3. Extract the php source files and place them on:

     c:\php-sdk\php53dev\vc9\x86\php5.3.x

  4. Then compile the sources to see if everything is working:

     cd c:\php-sdk\php53dev\vc9\x86\php5.3.x
 buildconf
 configure --disable-all --disable-zts --enable-cli
 nmake

Compile wxPHP

  1. Get wxPHP sources:

     git clone git@github.com:wxphp/wxphp.git wxphp

  2. Put the source code in the ext folder of your php build folder:

     c:\php-sdk\php53dev\vc9\x86\php5.3.x\ext\wxphp

    Note: Make sure to read the README_MSW for some compilation and linking fixes

  3. Open the Windows SDK 6.1 CMD Shell and do the following:

     setenv /release /x86 /xp
 cd c:\php-sdk\
 bin\phpsdk_setvars.bat
 cd c:\php-sdk\php53dev\vc9\x86\php5.3.x
 buildconf
 configure --disable-all --disable-zts --enable-cli --with-wxwidgets=C:\wxWidgets_installation_path
 nmake

Copy the resulting php_wxwidgets.dll file on the Release directory to the php extensions directory of your current PHP 5 VC9 X86 Non Thread Safety setup.

If you want the wxWidget extension to be automatically loaded, add the following lines to the end of your php.ini:

[PHP_WXWIDGETS]
extension=php_wxwidgets.dll

Building and Installing on Linux/Unix Environments

Install C/C++ compilers and autoconf tools

Ubuntu and Debian based distros:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Compile wxWidgets library and development packages

wxWebView, a web browser like control, was enabled on the wrapper, in order to compile wxWidgets with wxWebView support you will need to have libwebkitgtk development files and library. On ubuntu and debian based distros this could be done with:

sudo apt-get install libwebkitgtk-dev

Download wxWidgets tar file and uncompress it on your directory of choice or svn checkout with:

*NOTE: Remember to use tar.bz2 when downloading sources, using the zip file results on compilation errors under linux, since file line endings are formatted for windows.

svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/tags/WX_2_9_4 wxWidgets

NOTE: Currently we have tested with wxWidgets 2.9.4 version.

On the console change to the wxWidgets directory and:

./configure --prefix=/opt/wxWidgets
make
sudo make install

Install php5 development packages

Ubuntu and Debian based distros:

apt-get install php5-dev

Configure and build the extension

cd wxphp
phpize
./configure --with-wxwidgets=/opt/wxWidgets
make

Installing the extension

After make a file named wxwidgets.so will be generated on the modules directory. You can reduce the file size by stripping debugging symbols by using the strip utility:

strip modules/wxwidgets.so

Then you can copy the resulting wxwidgets.so file on the modules directory to the php extensions directory. PHP extensions directory is usually found on /usr/lib/php5/ On Ubuntu 10.04 - 12.04 this directory is /usr/lib/php5/20090626/

To automate the installation process just use:

sudo make install

If you want the wxWidget extension to be automatically loaded, add the following lines to your php.ini:

; load php wxwidgets module
extension=wxwidgets.so

If not, then enable dynamic loading on your php.ini usually on:

/etc/php5/cli/php.ini

modify enable_dl = off to enable_dl = on

Creating a DEB Package

First ensure you are able to build with the linux building instructions. Then in order to create a debian package you would need to first compile wxWidgets with configure as:

./configure --prefix=/opt/wxwidgets-php --enable-monolithic
make 
make install

After that, copy /opt/wxwidgets-php into the debian directory on the wxphp source tree, and at the wxphp source tree root execute:

dpkg-buildpackage

That should take care of building and creating a deb package. We aren't using upstream wxWidgets packages since they are sometimes compiled with less features and there aren't 2.9.4 packages of wxWidgets available on ubuntu or debian repositories.

Linking statically to wxWidgets on Linux/Unix/MacOSX

Statically linking is a good idea to package wxphp into rmp/deb files without dependencies on third party wxGTK packages that may be incompatible. On 64 bits static linking is impossible without the use of -fPIC or so that has been my experience, so here is the steps involved to achieve it.

  1. Compile wxWidgets with -fPIC

     CFLAGS="-fPIC -O2 -Wall -W" CXXFLAGS="-fPIC -O2" \
 ../configure --prefix=/opt/wxWidgets-static --disable-shared --enable-monolithic

  2. Run the generated wxphp configure script with custom ld flags

     LDFLAGS="-L/opt/wxWidgets-static/lib -pthread -lwx_gtk2u-2.9 -lwx_gtk2u_gl-2.9 -lwxregexu-2.9 -lwxscintilla-2.9 -lwxtiff-2.9" \
 ./configure --with-wxwidgets=/opt/wxWidgets-static --enable-wxwidgets-monolithic

  3. Strip debugging symbols for smaller library size

     strip modules/wxwidgets.so

If a smaller library size is wanted it could be achieved by playing with the GCC optimization flags, when compiling the wxWidgets library on the first step as on the second step. Some flags that could reduce the file size (a little bit) of final libraries as increase performance could be -Os and -s for example:

CFLAGS="-fPIC -Os -s" CXXFLAGS="-fPIC -Os -s"

Building on MacOSX Lion

The process of building on mac is the same as on linux the only differences are the way we configure wxWidgets build, as the applications needed. We have tested with the php version available on mac ports.

Requirements

  1. Xcode (for a working compiling environment)

  2. Mac Ports (for PHP development environment and binaries)

Install PHP from Mac Ports

This process could take a long time since mac ports application downloads php sources and dependency sources and compiles.

sudo port install php5

Get wxWidgets sources and build

svn checkout http://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/tags/WX_2_9_4 wxWidgets
cd wxWidgets
mkdir mybuild
cd mybuild
../configure -with-osx_cocoa --disable-compat24 --with-macosx-version-min=10.6 --with-macosx-sdk=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.6.sdk --prefix=/opt/wxWidgets CFLAGS="-arch x86_64" CXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64" CPPFLAGS="-arch x86_64" LDFLAGS="-arch x86_64" OBJCFLAGS="-arch x86_64" OBJCXXFLAGS="-arch x86_64"

Note: if non 64 bit architecture just remove the x86_64 flags from the configure command

make
sudo make install

Compile wxPHP as usual

cd wxphp
phpize
./configure --with-wxwidgets=/opt/wxWidgets
make
sudo make install

Running the examples

In order to run the examples provided you need to install php cli version. On ubuntu this is done by running:

sudo apt-get install php5-cli

To run the examples change on your console to the examples directory and run the php interpreter on each file as follows:

php thread.php

on windows you can also do

php-win thread.php

Third Party Tools

wxFormBuilder - a RAD tool for wxWidgets GUI design.

We worked on adding php support to this great forms designer. For more information visit the official website:

Also You can find the latest nightly builds for windows with PHP support at:

Integration of PHP support wouldn't be possible without the help of RedTide and the rest of wxFormBuilder team, Thanks a lot!

Development

For those interested on helping improve this extension this section explains the basics of how it works. Almost every subdirectory contains a README file explaining its content so be sure to check them all ;)

Code is auto generated

Almost all the wxPHP extension source code is generated by a set of php scripts except app.h, app.cpp, references.h and references.cpp. Even at a certain point config files are re-generated to update the list of source files that need to be compiled. The PHP script that generates the source code uses as input the xml files produced by doxygen from the wxWidgets docs. This xml files are parsed by another tool and then converted into json files for easy mapping into php arrays using json_decode function.

XML Parser

On the xml_parser directory you will find the script on charge of parsing the xml files and converting them to json files. This script uses the xml files on the xml directory as input. In order to regenerate this xml files with the most recent changes you would need an svn trunk copy of wxWidgets then inside of the wxWidgets directory:

cd docs\doxygen
./regen.sh xml

This will produce hundreds of xml files that constitute the wxWidgets documentation. You would need to copy all the files on out/xml to the xml directory on the root directory of wxPHP. After you run the xml_parser script with:

php tools/xml_parser.php

Some json files will be generated on the json dir, this files are

classes.json, consts.json, global_variables.json, typedef.json
class_groups.json, enums.json, includes.json, class_variables.json,
functions.json

NOTE: For some other details check the README file on the xml_parser directory.

Code Generator

Inside tools/source_maker directory resides the php script in charge of all the C/C++ code generation (code_generator.php) that forms the wxPHP extension. As said before this script depends on the json files generated by xml_parser.php on json directory at root of wxPHP you will find a copy of all these files. The source maker will read the json files and create a set of headers and source files wrapping the wxWidgets classes defined on classes.json

It starts by decoding all json files and cleaning methods with unsupported parameter types as other qualities not handled correctly by the generator. All the cleaning activity is logged on a file named discarded.log. Then it process each class using a php template system. The templates directory holds the source of what will form the skeleton of the wrapping code.

After generating the classes binding code it generates binding code to the global wxWidgets functions and store them on functions.cpp. Then it populates the files on source_templates directory with all the code needed to initialize each binded class, function, global variable, etc... At the final stage, it uses the config_templates directory to retrieve the configuration files skeleton and populate it with the list of files that need to be compiled.

Use the go.sh/bat utility script to automate some of the steps necessary or build.sh script on the wxPHP root directory (linux only) to automate installation of the extension.

NOTE: For more information about the code generator check the README file on tools/source_maker directory.

Class/Methods Selector

An GUI utility on tools/source_maker/class_selector/selector.php was created using wxPHP itself in order to facilitate the selection of the class methods that are going to be binded. To use this utility you need to have a working wxPHP.

This utility uses the file named full_classes_set.json that is actually a copy of the classes.json generated by the xml parser. When saving the selected methods it creates a file named classes.json that is the one actually used by the code generator. This file automatically replaces the one on dumps directory each time the go.sh/bat utility is ran to generate the code.

NOTE: For more information about the utility check the README file on source_maker/class_selector directory.

Support

Any problems, please refer to the official website:

or visit the sourceforge.net project page at:

About

Build cross-platform software with rich native GUIs using the combined power of the PHP language and the wxWidgets library.

License:Other