PHP Magazine has a new note today about a PHP/Java bridge that has been developed to connect "a PHP object system with the Java or ECMA 335 object system."

It implements JSR 223 (where applicable) and can be used to access CLR (e.g. VB.NET, C#) or Java (e.g. Java, KAWA, JRuby) based applications from PHP scripts. The PHP/Java Bridge communicates with the VM through local sockets using an efficient communication protocol. Each request-handling PHP process of a multi-process HTTP server communicates with a corresponding thread spawned by the VM.

Requests from more than one HTTP server may either be routed to an application server running the PHP/Java Bridge or each HTTP server may own a PHP/Java Bridge and communicate with a J2EE java application server by exchanging java value objects; the necessary client-stub classes (ejb client .jar) can be loaded at run-time.

It definitely sounds like it has potential - but I'd like to see the performance on it before I commit to anything. For more information, check out the Sourceforge project page for the bridge...