Towards a standalone application

➡ We are look­ing for a suit­able plat­form to com­pile stand­alone ver­sions of Bol Processor BP3.

Currently, Bol Processor BP3 is the asso­ci­a­tion of a con­sole (writ­ten in C lan­guage) and a set of PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript files work­ing as its inter­face. A con­sole ver­sion of Csound may also be attached. Check page Bol Processor ‘BP3’ and its PHP inter­face for instal­la­tion instructions.

This all works beau­ti­ful­ly in a design com­pat­i­ble with sev­er­al 64-bit sys­tems: MacOS, Linux and Windows. However it requires the instal­la­tion of an Apache+PHP pack­age to run the inter­face. (We are cur­rent­ly using the free-of-charge ver­sion of MAMP to devel­op BP3’s inter­face on Mac computers.)

The next step will be to cre­ate a stand­alone appli­ca­tion replac­ing the web brows­er and its PHP/HTML/CSS files. The appli­ca­tion should run under Linux, MacOS and Windows. A num­ber of plat­forms have been devel­oped dur­ing the past two decades that would build desk­top appli­ca­tions repro­duc­ing the behav­iour of files acti­vat­ed by MAMP. Unfortunately, most of these seem to be aban­doned or at least not updat­ed for years. We are look­ing for an up-to-date version.

Below is a list of require­ments for a prop­er com­pi­la­tion of the PHP/HTML/CSS/Javascript inter­face. Please pro­vide links to pos­si­ble solu­tions in com­ments at the bot­tom of this page, or pri­vate­ly via the Contact page.

Requirements

1. Display a HTML/PHP page using links to its CSS file(s)
2. Support the “require_once()” pro­ce­dure to bind sev­er­al PHP pages together
3. Support all types of HTML “<input>” instruc­tions: fields, but­tons, check­box­es etc.
4. Support “$_GET” and “$_POST” to han­dle forms
5. Support PHP “open()” instruc­tion to create/update text files
6. Support PHP “exec()” instruc­tion to send com­mands to the console
7. Support multi-tag or multi-window work space
8. Support Javascript “window.open()” to cre­ate pop-up windows
9. Support HTML CANVAS graph­ics and PHP GD graphics
10. Support HTML Audio tag to stream WAV sound files
11. Preferably imbed­ding Chrome browser

Note that nei­ther data­bas­es nor SESSION vari­ables are used in the inter­face. Temporary data is pre­served in files auto­mat­i­cal­ly trashed when obsolete.

A glob­al vari­able “$which_system” may be set at the begin of the code to com­pile desk­top appli­ca­tions run­ning under dif­fer­ent sys­tems. Minimum sys­tem ver­sions could be: MacOS 10.14 (Mojave), Windows 10, Linux ≥ January 2019.