Arno Kuhl wrote:
Stut, that's an interesting point you raised. I know it's moving off the original topic, but when you say "by no means limited to being used on a server never mind on a web server", what is it that interprets the code and where does the output go to, or the input come from? I also thought it always had to be run under a web server, and would be interested to know what the other options/opportunities are.
You can run it from the command line (http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.php). I use it all the time for everything from cron'd admin scripts to mail processing systems. PHP is an extremely powerful language in any environment.
As for where the output goes and where input comes from it's up to you. Anything you print/echo/output in any way from a CLI script will be displayed on the screen, but this can be redirected if needed. Input can come interactively from the user (http://php.net/readline), from a file or from a number of other sources. When you're thinking about PHP as a general programming language it's no different from any other language in terms of how it deals with input and output.
As somebody else has already mentioned, GUI functionality can come from GTK (http://gtk.php.net/) or you can do a certain amount with the win32std PECL extension (http://pecl.php.net/package/win32std).
Hope that encourages you to consider PHP for use outside the web environment.
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