Alien Arena Server Browser in PHP-GTK

[tttonyyy]

EDIT: Now discontinued in favour of a native C-GTK+ application, but it might be useful for anyone that wants an example of UDP network communications using PHP-GTK.

http://www.cooldark.com/aa/downloads/phpbrowser-1.0.zip

This was a cross platform PHP-GTK app for users of the freeware game Alien Arena (First Person Shooter based on the Quake 2/3 engine).

Of course, without the game the "Join" button won't let you join a server, but you should be able to see a list of games servers and who is playing.

Certainly getting sockets to work meant adding "--enable-sockets" to the configure line given in the gtk.php.net installation tutorial for Linux. I'm surprised this isn't considered a default, since surely many people would want to develop network enabled applications? (No such problem with Gnope I'm pleased to say).

[tttonyyy]

Updated first post to indicate discontinuation of this project.

This has been an interesting journey. The community uptake of this little PHP-GTK utility was good (and a few people still steadfastly use it today, despite the alternatives). But there were several problems with getting it to work well under the many distros of Linux, usually down to something wrong with the distribution rather than anything else. No-one that had Gnope under Win32 reported any issues - so in that regard, Gnope is a big success. But the cross-platform Linux side was a headache.

Initially, I ported this app to Ruby-GTK, but again, not as cross platform as I hoped. Easy for Linux users (worked well for most) of them - but the Ruby Win32 install was a painful process for end users, and their uptake was not great.

So now I have ended up with a Win32 executable written in C using the GTK+ libraries (including Glade), which will be ported to Linux. Coding GTK apps in C is 10x harder and slower than under PHP/Ruby, but hopefully the installation process will be simpler for end users on the target platforms.

That said, Gnope is without a doubt a huge asset to getting PHP applications onto the desktop, and I have no doubt that the cross platform issues that I've experienced with coding a PHP-GTK app will disappear as with greater Linux PHP-GTK uptake and maturity.

Keep up the good work!

Kind regards,

Tony