API Platform Conference 2026 - Johan Janssens - Building Desktop Apps with FrankenPHP

PHP on the desktop sounds like a bad idea. Until it works. FrankenPHP isn’t just a Caddy module, it’s a Go library you can embed anywhere. FrankenWails combines it with Wails, Go’s answer to Electron. The result: native desktop apps where PHP handles the backend, HTML/CSS/JS handles the UI, and Go is the glue. No Node.js, no Electron, no server. Just a single binary. In this talk, we’ll look at how PHP, Go, and the frontend communicate inside a single process, how to expose native menus,…