Re: PHP on WinCE

On 19/06/02, "Peter Petermann" <webmaster@fist-center.de> wrote: > At the PHP Conference last Year in Frankfurt, one of the visitors from Munich > told > me that he was working on some PDA stuff, but those PDA's used a "normal" > Windows, > if my memories are correct.. I'll try to look if i still got his > businesscard, maybe you could talk with him about that stuff. That might be useful; if you can find it - thanks. > hm, what are the advantages of doing a PHP for that WinCE PDA's, instead > of doing the client Application (the one on the PDA's) in a language like C? The answer is quite simple: which is faster and easier to program? If I use a micro PHP server, "pocket IE" can render HTML for the UI, PHP can handle the OS dependencies and the PHP code is fast to prototype/develop and can be written to be portable to other PDA OS's with very little effort. If I were to write it in C, I'd have to research the architecture of different PDA OS's in advance to make sure that my code wouldn't need to be rewritten for each new platform, then I'd have to port the other libraries that I might need, develop the UI separately for each OS and prepare different testing programmes for each. That's a lot of work :-) Then there are all those string manipulations - really cumbersome in C. I've a feeling that porting to CE will be pretty much a case of adding a new build target to the existing PHP-Win32 source and compiling, with the odd #ifdef here and there. That sounds really nice in comparision to the idea of writing from scratch in C. Porting to other PDA OS's might be a bit more work, in terms of the build system, but that's not on the cards just yet. > well, i guess you can kick out a lot of stuff for your "micro PHP", > maybe you need to write a extension to access a database system that may > run on those PDA's (?!) if you dont want to use flat files for your data > storage.. It will most likely be some kind of flat file, and it won't matter so much: most PDA storage is in RAM anyway, so the data is generally relatively small: it will be quite fast to search, and there won't be network contention issues (the other source of problems with flat files, in my experience). A neat idea is to try out the embedded mysql library there too, but I'm not sure how much memory overhead that would require. --Wez.