Writing Silverlight applications in PHP

In my last post about Phalanger I mentioned that our important goal is to support the Silverlight (2.0) platform. Shortly Silverlight is a cross-browser platform that can be used for developing client-side components that run in the web browser and contain rich media, graphics and can interactively communicate with the user. The language that can be used for writing Silverlight code can be in general any .NET language, so our goal is to allow using PHP by making Phalanger compatible with Silverlight.

First steps were already made and it is becoming possible to write some very interesting things in Silverlight using PHP, there is of course still a lot of work to do and we're discussing the future development with PHP development team (you can join the mailing list PHP on DLR for more info). In this article we will first show a very basic Silverlight example that uses PHP and later I will shortly comment more complicated example - a game (quite addicting, so be careful :-)!) where you have to fly with helicopter and avoid the walls. The source code for helicopter game is also attached, so feel free to modify it or create similar games!

If you can't wait to try the demos before looking at the sources, here are the links:

• Simple car demo - Click on the car and it will move!
• Helicopter game demo - Click left button to fly up!

A few notes about Phalanger future

First, I'd like to aplogoize for the lack of new about the Phalanger project recently. I spent some time working as an intern with the F# team in MSR Cambridge and I also had final bachelor exam this autumn. Anyway, this doesn't mean that there isn't anything new and interesting regarding the Phalanger project comming soon - actually (as I believe) the opposite is true! The topics that I'm going to further discuss in this article is our upcomming support for Silverlight platform, the relation between Phalanger and DLR and also our desire to make Phalanger more open to the community, so stay tuned!

All blog posts by tag