Open source webdesktopmobile kit bear hugs PHP

Appcelerator Titanium - the open source platform that lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools, including JavaScript, Python, and Ruby on Rails - has now embraced PHP.

The three-year-old Appcelerator will officially reveal its PHP love tomorrow at the Zend PHP conference in its home town of Mountain View, California.

Originally unveiled this past December, Titanium aims to turn web developers into everything developers. "We take someone with JavaScript skills, Ruby skills, that sort of thing, and we turn them into someone who can extend their web apps into a mobile or desktop applications," Appcelerator vice president of marketing Scott Schwarzhoff tells The Reg. "In addition to having a web-based CRM client, you can now have a desktop CRM client or a mobile extension for your mobile workforce."

Essentially, the platform offers a laundry list of desktop and mobile APIs accessible from common web languages. Through these APIs, you can hook into local data and operating system resources on Windows, Linux, and Mac desktops and notebooks; iPhones; and Android handsets. "Rather than having to learn, say, Windows or Objective-C for the iPhone, you can access local devices using a web language you're familiar with," Schwarzhoff says.

At least initially, Titanium will only allow PHP coding for desktop and notebook applications. PHP devs can access a machine's local file system, tap system notifications, allow drag-and-drop to and from the desktop GUI, and so on.

Tagged with an Apache 2 license, Titanium can be downloaded here. It's available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. ®