PHP-Qt 0.9 Released

The PHP-Qt team is pleased to announce the immediate release of PHP-Qt version 0.9!

PHP-Qt is an extension for PHP5 that enables the writing of desktop software in PHP using Qt language bindings.

It's been nearly six months since the latest release and numerous
enhancements have been made during this time.
Changes include:

* implemented user interface compiler for PHP (which means you can now use Qt Designer with PHP-Qt!)
* implemented arguments for custom signals which now can be connected to any Qt or custom slots
* ported to MacOS X (Leopard)
* implemented handler for '__clone()' magic method
* allocating more memory for marshalling 'double'
* automatic conversion of double into long and the reverse
* wrote tutorials 9, 10, and 11
* improved calling of ambiguous methods

While there is still a bit to do before the 1.0 release, we are now close enough to confidently call this the 0.9 release. Some of the things missing which we are planning for 1.0 include: better handling of Qt container classes, packages for Kubuntu, Mandriva, and Mac OS X, Eclipse integration, improved error handling and debugging for developers, and support for all types in signals/slots.

More information and downloads are available from http://php-qt.org

Having absolutely no experience with PHP I would greatly appreciate general explanation to why this project is important either to PHP community or to QT development. I can understand why PHP developer might want to harness the power of QT libraries, but looking through the tutorials I see how PHP scripting replaces straight QT programming. It will be great if PHP-Qt project leaders would explain to general audience intended usage of this project.

Well, put very simply, PHP-Qt exists for the same reason Qt/Jambi or PyQt, or any of the other Qt language bindings exist (or even PHP-GTK for that matter). All languages have their inherent strengths and weaknesses.

PHP offers the ability to get a project off the ground very quickly, there is a lot of overhead in coding in C++ that you don't have in PHP... worrying about variable types, casting, writing header files, compiling each time you want to test it, etc. PHP also offers many advantages such as great introspection support and the ability for an application to change it's own code at runtime.

Additionally for coders who already use PHP on a daily basis, but are maybe not so familiar with C++, it means they can simply learn the Qt API to write desktop applications, rather than having to also learn C++ along with it.