New on the Ibuildings blog there's a post from Ian Barber looking at the powerful combination of PHP and Java to make your applications even more robust.

There are many reasons to want to integrate these new developments with Java rather than just creating a separate silo - existing libraries or systems that would be difficult or expensive to replicate, well-tested systems providing key functionality, and an existing team of developers are just a few. So, the best way is often to mix and match the two - which is easier than it might first appear.

He looks at the four main ways to integrate the two technologies, some being a bit easier to implement than others:

• Indirect integration (shared data source)
• PHP on the JVM
• PHP to Java (bridge)
• PHP consuming Java services

Alvaro Videla has submitted a new post he's written up combining PHP and Erlang yet again, but this time he's using it to just store key/value pairs rather than for session data.

In this post I want to show you some of the neat things that can be done with the PHP-Erlang Bridge extension: A Key Value Store. Erlang comes packed with a Key Value store in the form of the ETS module. This is database is pretty fast and efficient for storing the Erlang terms in memory.

He tried a proof of concept to see how well the system would respond and was able to push over 150k items into the storage in one second. Sample code and instructions on getting the bridge working are included in the post.

In this new post to the Liip blog Tobias Ebnother looks at Jackalope that's looking to bring JCR functionality into the toolset offered to PHP developers.

We initiated a new open source project called Jackalope. Its purpose is to bring JCR via Jackrabbit to the PHP world. [...] JCR provides a great standardized storage for hierarchical content and supports some nice features like full text search, versioning, transactions, observation, and more. Our main goal is to create a PHP Connector for Jackrabbit without using any Java.

To accomplish this, they're doing things in two steps. First, they've created a setup with the Java bridge (from Zend Server) to make the connection back to the Jackrabbit server and making writing tests to that API. The second step is to swap out the Java bridge with the Jackalope connection piece. You can check out the current state of the project on its Github page or come and ask questions of the team on the Freenode IRC network (#jackalope).

In a recent post to his blog Ant Phillips looks at how you can integrate the SAP Netweaver softare into Zero PHP (a Java PHP clone).

I thought it would be interesting to hook up a Zero PHP application with a SAP NetWeaver system. So last weekend I summoned up the courage and, armed with a bottle of red wine, set about the task. Surprisingly enough it wasn't too difficult (setting aside finding 20GB of disk space needed by the installer).

He talks about making the connection via SAP's JCo middleware component and the PHP/Java bridge that comes with the standard Zero installation. Code is included showing how to make the connection and grab information from the SAP data store.

In a recent post Ant Phillips looks at another bridge that's offered to combine PHP with another language (besides the Java one) - a link over to Groovy.

Up until recently the PHP runtime was treating Groovy code just the same as Java. Anyone could compile a Groovy class to Java class files using the Groovy compiler. Those class files could then be dropped into a Zero application and used in PHP through the PHP/Java Bridge. The problem is that Groovy isn't the same as Java.

He compares the way its works when its Java-esque and how it should work as combined with the Groovy bridge. The code is much cleaner and, by making it more readable, makes it easier to maintain in the future. You can see some slides from a presentation hes given on the subject here.

Following up on their introduction to design patterns, the PHP Freaks have posted tutorials covering three of the more popular patterns - strategy/bridge, value object and singleton.

• Strategy and Bridge - The Strategy and Bridge patterns provide solutions to apply polymorphism in more flexible way than you can accomplish with only inheritance.
• Value Object - The Value Object pattern has, just like the Singleton, to do with referencing and instances. In a way, the Value Object is the opposite of the Singleton: it's goal is to ensure NOT to use the same instance, under certain conditions.
• Singleton and Singleton Registry - The Singleton pattern ensures that you are always dealing with the same, single instance, wherever in your application. The Registry pattern usually utilizes the Singleton pattern (hence "Singleton Registry") to make the same 'globalness' apply to objects who's classes weren't necessarily designed to

Keep checking back to their tutorials section for more design pattern tutorials.

The IBM developerWorks site has this new tutorial posted showing how to combine two different languages, PHP and Jave, with the help of the Java bridge in the WebSphere sMash environment.

The WebSphere sMash environment enables rapid development of interactive Web applications based on popular Web technologies such as PHP, and it lets you reuse existing Java assets from PHP scripts. This article introduces the Java Bridge and shows how to access Java classes from PHP.

They create a sample project to work with in sMash and show how to implement and create a new the Java object that automatically loads and makes available to PHP the functionality inside. They look at accessing static methods and fields, catching exceptions, type conversion, and working with SQL connections.

This recent post on the PHP::Impact blog spotlights a useful little tool for those developers needing to span the gap between PHP and Java in their applications - the PHP/Java Bridge.

The PHP/Java bridge allows you to quickly access Java classes from within your PHP classes without having to know Java and vice versa. Because of this two-way flexibility, you can access hundreds of pre-built Java classes from PHP, and hundreds of pre-built PHP classes from Java opening up your applications to greater flexibility and enhanced functionality.

The post includes an introduction to the bridge's functionality - its functions/methods, how to make a new instance of it, catching exceptions and the type conversion it automatically does (like lang.java.String directly to the PHP String type).

They also mention the Zend Platform bridge functionality for a more commercial solution.

Mike Naberezny has start up a new resource to try to bridge some of the gap between PHP and Ruby and to help developers of either to get a bit more insight into the others' side - Rails for PHP Developers (based on the book published by the Pragmatic Programmers).

Rails for PHP Developers is a new site for PHP developers who are also interested in Rails and Ruby. PHP and Ruby are great complementary tools that are sometimes seen as adversarial, which is really unfortunate. We use both and we'll be writing regular articles to help cross-pollinate ideas and promote collaboration between the communities.

There's already some good content there - useful perlisms in ruby, a look at PHP object attributes and some information about the release of the site itself.

On his blog, Vinu Thomas has posted a guide to installing the Java bridge for PHP on an Ubuntu system:

If you're looking for the easiest way to install the PHP Java Bridge in Ubuntu, follow these simple steps...

The basic steps are quick and easy - be sure you have Java installed on your system (commands to install are included), download the Java bridge from Sourceforge and issue the commands (again, included) to install it into your apache2 package.