Looking for suggestions for a bad idea

[Levisallanon]

So I'm a competition management system for a certain sport, which will support a variaty of different scoring software packages to communicate with. One of the requirements of this system is that it will be easy to use and cheap to use. The system should work for very small competitions and bigger ones. So I want to see if it's possible to make an online solution which can also work in a offline situation, why you ask?
Well this system has to run in all kinds of different venues, some of them have very crappy or even no internet at all, so the system shouldn't be reliable on internet to function. But on the other hand in a small setup it would be nice if it could work just online so people don't have to install anything.

So my idea is to have different "roles" in the programming and have RESTFUL API's commuicating with each other between these roles. each role can function online or offline and you just need to configure (or it will be done for you probably) which IP it has to communicate with.

Now for the bad idea, I want to program this in php because of the high database dependacies and because I know php pretty okay. Another reason is because most webservers allow for php and i don't want to be restricted in which host/server is used by using for example node.js and finding it's not supported.
 

So the question

I want to have a php script running on a desktop. This is not that hard, i found solutions like "php desktop" which can do this. But preferbly I also want my code not to be viewable.
Does anyone know for any licencefree/free applications which can be used to do this propperly?

[vorticalbox]

You could just install a web server such has xampp or wamp and then just run a website locally. Also just because of the database requirement doesn't limit you to PHP pretty much every language has the ability to interact with a database.

[Levisallanon]

3 hours ago, vorticalbox said:

You could just install a web server such has xampp or wamp and then just run a website locally. Also just because of the database requirement doesn't limit you to PHP pretty much every language has the ability to interact with a database.

Php Desktop does kind of the same thing. The thing is I want people to be able to download it and run it easily so I don't always have to be there to set it up.
I know other languages also support database functions, but If possible i want the version running on the webserver and the version running on the clients to use the same code. so this limits the scope already. now I also want it to be able to run on most webservers without any special setup, so PHP came to mind. And maybe the easiest reason, I'm lazy and I don't want to learn another language when not needed :P.

[kanasta]

XAMPP used to be able to run without further setup from USB for example, if you set it up correctly beforehand. It also includes a MySQL database (or at least it used to, haven't checked in a while). The same goes for a PHP module. Might be worht a try

[Levisallanon]

15 minutes ago, kanasta said:

XAMPP used to be able to run without further setup from USB for example, if you set it up correctly beforehand. It also includes a MySQL database (or at least it used to, haven't checked in a while). The same goes for a PHP module. Might be worht a try

I'm familiar with XAMPP but it doesn't solve the second part of the question where I don't want my code to be viewable.

[kanasta]

im not sure if there is a way to make it unviewable when browsing directorys, maybe by permitting access only for the apache user? (is that even possible in windows?)
in the web frontend, php should never be visible, unless you make a mistake and put it in a html comment

[Levisallanon]

Just now, kanasta said:

im not sure if there is a way to make it unviewable when browsing directorys, maybe by permitting access only for the apache user? (is that even possible in windows?)
in the web frontend, php should never be visible, unless you make a mistake and put it in a html comment

the phpfiles itself are just in the wwwroot folder of xampp.
What I'm ideally looking for is something which packages something like xampp and the files and everything and makes 1 binary out of it.