There are vaious options for integrating PHP witj WebSphere. Daniel Krook provided the various options for integrating PHP with WebSphere, like building PHP as an Apache module and connecting to WAS via the Web server plugin, using the PHP Integration Kit to add PHP support to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, etc. One option he previewd was to use a PHP/Java Bridge, a technology that has been gaining much focus over the past months.

PHP-Java bridge enables zPHO developers to access Java code from within their applications and vice versa. The benefit, says Daniel Krook, is that you can use libraries or services deployed on one platform from code that exists in a different environment. “While you can always use Web service APIs to communicate between your applications over HTTP, PHP-Java bridges provide a method to access the external application’s API directly from the source code. As such, they are much more efficient than traditional network calls,” adds Krook.

The implementations enable the following techniques:
·         PHP running as a Web server module calls out to a servlet running on a J2EE application server
·         A servlet executes PHP scripts via CGI
PHP calls non-J2EE Java applications