I developed a PHP / MySQL based testing engine for studying purposes. I want to migrate this functionality to a standalone application for things that cannot be published on the web publicly.
Overall, I am very fluent with PHP as a language and feel very comfortable working with it. Can any of you suggest what some of the easier development paths are to choose from? I thought about C#, but I think that may be overkill for what I want to do, in addition to the learning curve of the language coming from PHP (namespaces, public / private functions, etc).
tl;dr : What's the easiest language to write a standalone windows application in if you are already familiar with PHP?
This will make your php website as an executable files
I would recommend Java since it is pretty easy and MySQL is pretty easy to work with using it. Overall though, you aren't going to find a too many languages that are similar to PHP when developing desktop applications.
Why not run a local web server and run your tools there? It's not on the public web, so you can keep your sensitive code offline, and you don't have to touch your code. You can use tools like Xampp to quickly install all the web server tools you need on your PC.