With its fast deployment cycles, PHP is ideal for companies short on skilled programming resources and/or facing tight time to market deadlines. PHP's features and benefits are so compelling it should be considered for your SOA solutions.

They talk about the PHP integration kit that IBM offers to make using PHP as simple as plugging in things in the right places and how that would fit in with a "Service Component Architecture" and "Service Data Objects". They even give a simple example of a SCA component that works much like a PHP class.

They wrap up the article with a look at some asynchronous messaging with PHP - using the SAM extension to communicate messages back to the server for common tasks (like putting text messages in a queue).

Just as you can communicate with DB2 from your PHP applications via three distinct interfaces - Unified ODBC, ibm_db2, and PDO - there are several approaches to adding PHP support to WebSphere Application Server, each with benefits and drawbacks.

As a disclaimer, I don't claim to represent IBM or provide IBM's viewpoints on this, but I'm offering this list as a general overview about what options are available as IBM continues to encourage the use of PHP in enterprise environments.

He offers four methods to getting WebSphere and PHP to play nicely together:

• Build PHP as an Apache module and connect to WAS via the Web server plugin
• Use the PHP Integration Kit to add PHP support to WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
• Use the PHP / Java Bridge
• Use an implementation of a PHP interpreter in Java

For each, there's a brief explaination as far as the steps to take to use the option and links to other resources that show in a bit more detail how to accomplish that kind of integration.