Blogger Daniel Krook has been thinking out loud about how to bridge Java and PHP. His thought process started with posts about working with PHP and the IBM WebSphere SOA application development environment. In that line of thinking was the idea of building a bridge between PHP and Java.

Krook writes:

"In essence, a PHP-Java bridge enables PHP developers to access Java code from within their applications and vice versa. The benefit is that you can reuse libraries or services deployed on one platform from code that exists in a different environment.

"This differs from the standard approach of using an HTTP server front end to route individual requests for PHP scripts or J2EE applications. The PHP or Java application can instead call the other without the HTTP server’s involvement.

"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."

• The open source PHP/Java Bridge hosted at SourceForge.
• The commercial Zend Platform Java Bridge developed by Zend Technologies.
• The free PHP Integration Kit for WebSphere Application Server Community Edition.