Re: Standalone PHP Client?

On Friday, June 20, 2003, at 11:42 AM, Brian V Bonini wrote:

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 13:57, 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.

How about demoing the client app and saying there is also an on-line version...??

Well, I wish that it was that easy, but although there are a lot of loyal users to our client version, it has *major* flaws. We're basically taking the existing functionality and wrapping it into a similar but correct GUI and fixing so many bugs and changing the interface at least enough to confuse the user. Also, we plan to eliminate the client side version for new users once the server side version is up. So basically, we can't. -Galen