Re: Standalone PHP Client?

Well, having a solid product that people can look at offline has been a major selling point in the past. The customers we cater to appreciate a physical product. We could give them HTML that sends them online, but we could just as easily give them a card with an URL on it and not waste CD media for a 1K shortcut file. I can't confess to completely understand these people who really want a local product for something that must be uploaded to the internet in the end and is dependent on our servers to handle checkout and order processing - it's just a psychological thing, I guess. I'm trying to investigate how hard it would be to get a demo product on a CD that basically goes through an installer process and installs some back end PHP/MySQL stuff so a demo can be run locally. What exactly would be involved in compiling a PHP client with the source myself - are there any existing products along these lines? It probably wouldn't be practical to develop a whole project our selves, but if there was something already out there, we might use it. -Galen On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 11:04 AM, Michael A Smith wrote:

Why not have them all do that? HTML that re-directs? Other than taking the source, compiling yourself, or taking the pre-compiled windows binaries and including them, that's the only way. -Michael On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 09:57, Galen P. Zink wrote:

I work for a small networking company. We're working on a piece of software that will be run server-side with PHP and MySQL. It allows the user to develop an online store and handles all the complex shopping cart stuff with ease. It is a port of an originally client-side application. We would like to be able to hand out demo discs that do not require the internet to try it out - having a standalone try-out version is a big source of customers. Is there any kind of standalone PHP/MySQL engine that could be reasonably installed from a CD and run on most Windows machines? If there was some method to compile the PHP into a binary or otherwise protect it, it would be really good because our company would not be too excited about handing out the near-complete source to our product on all the demo discs. It would be nice if there was support for non-Windows OSes, but Windows is by far the majority in market share and the other OSes could easily just pop into an HTML document that directs them to our online version. Thanks, Galen P. Zink