In this chapter we have covered the usage of PHP as a command line script interpreter. This allows you to create scripts that work interactively and can be executed from the command line.
Firstly we created a static script for analyzing web logs in the NCSA format. This script was set up in such a way that it would only analyze one log. We then extended the script so that you could pass various parameters via the command line, allowing for a flexible script that could handle a variety of logs sent to a number of administrators.
We also covered the creation of a simple interactive script in the form of a small number guessing game. This script used the libedit library and demonstrated some of the methods used to create more complex interactive shell scripts.
Following this we looked at PHP-GTK, a PHP extension that was written to allow client-side, cross- platform GUI application programming. Even though the project is in the developmental phase at the time of writing, it allows fairly sophisticated applications to be built.
Finally, we created a PHP-GTK front-end to the library application created in the database chapter.