Delphi for PHP - Rapid Application Development

If you are a web-programmer who have started professional experience by creating desktop applications in Integrated Development Environments like Delphi, C++ Builder or Visual Studio, you'll be pleased to know about a relatively new development tool called "Delphi for PHP".

In this article I'm going to show how easy is to build web-applications using WYSIWYG design service and powerful code management system provided by Delphi for PHP.

The first impression after launching IDE is quite encouraging. The look and feel is realy similar to Delphi (perhaps with some elements of Visual Basic user interface). Immediately it is possible to notice familiar control panels - Tool Palette, Object Inspector, Code Explorer and Project Manager.

Now let's try to create a simple project to test the features of IDE in practice. Start by clicking the New button below the toolbars.

New Items dialog box will appear.

Select PHP in Item Categories at the left side and click on Application icon. New PHP Application project will be created. Then you may add controls to your form using tool palette. For example, try to add a button, an text control and a list box. As you can see you have WYSIWYG design service where you can resize controls and move them around.

We can add the code for button click event simply by double-clicking on the button and we are in source editor ready to write the first line of code of our application.

Let's try to access the Items property of ListBox and assign with a contents of text.

<?php
....
function Button1Click($sender, $params)
{
    $this->ListBox1->Items[] = $this->Edit1->Text;
}
....
?>

Then click the Run button or simply press F9 to run the project. Put some appropriate text and click the button. We can see that we have an event that fires and fill the value of our list box. So, we've created our first application with three controls and a button click event.