Joel De Gan has recently been Slashdotted - linking an article he wrote on a project he did for work.

The project entailed building a stand alonbe desktop app with php (on the client side) using PHP-GTK.  Pretty nerdy - but it works.

The idea is that stand alone apps, running a full copy of php - can reside on your client machine - monitoring webapps, web services or just about anything else.