A PHP Compiler for the .NET Platform

Have you ever thought about programming a .NET applicaton with PHP? One that also includes a Graphical User Interface? Such a scenario has been unlikely so far, but this book turns the tide. It shows you how to translate PHP scripts into .NET assemblies and how to run them on Windows and other operating systems. Since PHP has become an exciting programming language, it is time for the .NET community to benefit from it. The focus of this book is not about programming web applications; it is about implementing the language PHP as for the .NET Platform and how to integrate it with other .NET languages. Thus, software engineers can use PHP as a fully-fledged programming language for developing standalone applications outside of web pages. For this purpose, a compiler is presented that translates PHP scripts into .NET bytecode called Common Intermediate Language (CIL). This book also introduces PHP and CIL in detail and provides a good insight into basics and concepts of compiler construction. Furthermore, it looks behind the scenes of the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Mono Project, which is a considerable open-source implementation of the .NET Platform.