OK, even non-programmers like me can understand the benefit of having a functional shell in which you can see the immediate results of any said scripts being executed.

Playing with langauges like Python, Tcl or Scheme, one of the first nice things the programmer discovers is a powerful interactive shell where you can try in little time some line of code, and see the result printed on the standard output. Unfortunately PHP doesn’t have support for such a nice feature, there is the command line option -a, but it’s very rudimentary, and not that useful. Also what makes php -a not so useful is the fact that PHP is a language for web applications: often the program output is html code, so, doesn’t it make sense that a PHP shell will run on the web?. This is the simple idea that PHP Interactive tries to develop.

PHP Interactive is a simple PHP program that lets the user to write code in a text area (actually multiple text areas, with tabs to switch), and see the output of the code just pressing the update button. The scripts are persistent, and the program supports a raw and html output mode, in order to see the raw script output or to interpret it as html. [Read the rest]