Switching from web to desktop development

Question

Being a web developer (php, symfony, doctrine) for 2 years now, I was recently asked by a friend to come up with a desktop solution. So I developed a project, installed a LAMP on his machine and he is mostly happy using it now. But I'm not. It just doesn't seem right to wait for a server response from a localhost. Obviously php isn't suited for desktop development. So, my question is: what language \ framework would you advice a php programmer if he was going to develop a desktop application (something that you can install, that has it's own gui, but utilizes the similar concepts of web apps: css, javascript, orm).

I would like to bring up Python as a possible answer to my question. Does anyone have an experience of developing a desktop app with Python, utilizing an ORM and(or) HTML-based GUI?

Answer 1

You should definitely use Python. It's great and really easy to get up and running and extremely powerful.

utilizing an ORM and(or) HTML-based GUI

Please don't do this. HTML has its purposes, and it's not in desktop apps. Please don't force your experience into new technologies.

You should look at the various python GUI frameworks. Tkinter, PyQt ( my preference), or GTK