Overview

TurboPhp provides tools for rapid development of HTML files and PHP programs.

TurboPhp creates, opens, and saves special files (called .TurboHtml or .TurboPhp files) that contain information about the layout and behavior of a web page.

When your document is ready, you use the Publish command to create the .HTML and/or .PHP files that make up the web page.

.TurboHtml files are used to design, edit, and publish HTML documents. .TurboPhp files are used to design, edit, and publish PHP applications. PHP applications published by TurboPhp have an HTML template and a PHP code file.

Figure 2: TurboPhp publishs an .HTML and a .PHP document from a .TurboPhp document

Objects

With the visual page designer, objects can be selected from the palette and placed onto the page. Objects represent bits of the layout: text, images, containers for other objects, and so on.

Once an object is on the layout, it can be moved and/or resized with the mouse, or affected by adjusting the objects properties in the inspector.

Watch an object being modified in this Flash movie.

TurboPhp programs use the TpLib.php application framework to make designed objects available as objects in PHP too.

Objects on the layout are also objects in the PHP source. Each object in PHP has a global variable with the same name as the object in the designer.

For example, if there is a button on the layout with the name Button then there will be a object $Button available to PHP. These PHP objects have properties and behaviors that can be used in your PHP program.

Just as you can set the Caption property for a button in the object inspector, you can set the Caption property for a button object in PHP.

$Button->Caption = 'Send Data';

Objects on the layout can be assigned event functions. Event functions are functions in the PHP source code that are called under certain circumstances. For example, button objects have an OnClick event which is fired when the button is clicked. Using the object inspector, a function can be declared for the OnClick event in the PHP source like so:

function ButtonClick(&$inSender)
{
  // $inSender refers to the object that sent the event
  $inSender->Caption = 'Button Clicked';            
}