Desktop HTML Applications with PHP

HTA is a Microsoft technology that allows you to deploy an

HTML page consisting of scripts (written in JavaScript or VBScript) as a desktop

application on Windows. The advantage is the efforts and know-how required for

developing the UI of the application, which is same as that for any HTML page

(fire  up Dreamweaver and design). The functionality or processing is

imparted through scripting.

While you could use ASP objects with standard HTA, PHUI

allows you to use PHP with HTA. PHUI is a set of libraries (PHP and JavaScript)

and a PHP runtime, which allows JavaScipt residing in an HTA to call a PHP

script and get the results from the PHP script. All this happens without

requiring a Web server. Let us write a simple example to see how PHUI works.

The first look



Download PHUI from http://www.phpgeek.com/download /phui-demo.zip. Extract

the zipped file to C:\PHUI. Our 'hello world' HTA is as follows.

 







   






     APPLICATIONNAME="Hello World"







     BORDER="thin" BORDERSTYLE="normal"







     CAPTION="yes" MAXIMIZEBUTTON="yes"







     MINIMIZEBUTTON="yes" SCROLL="no"







     SHOWINTASKBAR="yes" SINGLEINSTANCE="yes"







     SYSMENU="yes" VERSION="1"







     WINDOWSTATE="normal"/>

Here, the tag is the standard tag

used to define a HTML Application. For more on HTML applications refer to

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/hta/overview/htaoverview.asp.

Note the inclusion of library.js file as

Save the file as C:\PHUI\userdetails.hta. Note that the

JavaScript here is calling details.php. Below is the code for



details.php.

include("library.php");







$post = $argv<1>;







$_HTA_POST = parse_ini_file($post);







$user = $_HTA_POST<"user">;







$conn = mysql_connect("127.0.0.1","root","secret");







mysql_select_db("pcqdb");







$query = "select email from user where name='$user'";







$query_result = mysql_query($query,$conn);







if(mysql_num_rows($query_result)>0)







{







            $row=mysql_fetch_array($query_result,

MYSQL_ASSOC);

hta_return($row<"email">);







}







else

hta_return("not found");







?>

Under the hood, PHUI uses simple text files to pass parameters and the return value amongst the JavaScript & the PHP script

Note the second and third lines of the PHP code above.

They store the values from the HTML form (the user's name entered in the test

field named user, in our case) in the variable named $_HTA_POST, which can be

subsequently retrieved as:

$user = $_HTA_POST<"user">;

The syntax of the above statement is:

= $_HTA_POST<"">;

Subsequently, the code connects to a MySQL database server

running on the same Windows machine, queries it and returns the result using

hta_return( ) function, as before. The connection to database and querying is

all standard PHP, and there is nothing specific to PHUI or HTA.

PHUI can be a boon if you want to leverage your PHP

skills  in developing small desktop applications or utilities. With



PHUI, you can even meet requirements like having a desktop application similar

to an already developed Web application.



You can reuse the code in your Web application with no or very



less rewriting.

Shekhar Govindarajan, IT4Enterprise