Running PHP on Embedded Devices - PHPing your Mobile Phone, NAS or Router

PHP is a scripting language that was originally designed for producing dynamic web pages. Since a command line interface is available, PHP can be used for developing standalone graphical applications on PCs as well. In contrast, we use a cross-compiled version of PHP for developing applications for embedded devices like cell phones, router oder networked attached storages (NAS). Due to mass production their price decreases steadily, although their processing capacity increases.

In this session we show how easy it is to use PHP for developing software for embedded devices based upon the ARM chipset. Because of their power saving features, ARM CPUs are dominant in the mobile electronics market, where low power consumption is a critical design goal. As of 2007, about 98 percent of the more than a billion mobile phones sold each year use at least one ARM CPU. As development environment we use special cross-compiling tools like Scratchbox or virtualisation of native ARM systems.
Afterward we present an application scenario for PHP running on an off-the-shelf NAS. We use PHP to develop a surveillance system for observing an office and to detect salient events. In this scenario a wild mixture of technologies (like SOAP, OpenCV etc.) is used to show the power of PHP for the usage on embedded devices and to bring a proof-of-concept of PHP’s applicability for embedded software development.