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How come a lot of the popular server-side languages (Java, Python, Perl, etc.) are also very popular for creating standalone programs, but it’s not the case for PHP? Is it even possible to write a standalone PHP application? If so, could it have GUI?
PHP was designed specifically for web pages unlike Java and Python which were designed for applications in general (PHP in the beginning meant Personal Home Pages), and this is why it isn’t used that much outside the web. You can, however, use PHP in the command line and therefore make executable scripts, but there is only one GUI binding that I currently know of: PHP-GTK. Development of PHP-GTK appears to have stopped two years ago, but it should be mostly reliable. Also, there appears to be a project that compiles PHP scripts to executables, even though that, too, is no longer being developed.