There are two basic approaches to make PHP on GlassFish Server; one is a PHP on JVM solution like Quercus from Caucho; the other is a bridge to a traditional PHP implementation, like the PHP JavaBridge or LRWPInJava.

A quick pass shows a number of references to these approaches: • Quercus: Number 9, John Yeary, Sebastien, Gautam, Davis, Arun, Jason. • JavaBridge: Davis, Jose-Diaz. • LRWPInjava: Drupal Case Study.

The bridges are technically easier because many PHP packages are not written in PHP and need to be ported, but the PHP-on-JVM solution seems easier to deploy and manage. Of course, another, very practical, solution is to just use a web server like Apache or Sun Web Server :-)

I'm interested in your experience; if you are using PHP on/via GlassFish, please consider posting a comment describing your approach.

Our next full-length webinar is on Scripting (or Dynamic) Languages in GlassFish v3 Prelude this Thursday, Nov 13th. Same usual time, 11:15 am Pacific Time. This is a full-length (1 hour) version of the presentation that Vivek gave last week at GlassFish Day (SlideShare, Recording). Vivek will cover the multiplicity of languages supported and the technology; demos will be included For more details, check the Schedule and Channel Overview. Hope to see you Online!

Dick has a detailed post on "LAMP stack on GlassFish" which really focused on Caucho's Quercus PHP runtime inside GlassFish to execute Wordpress (with MySQL as the back-end obviously). The post provides database setup details and prefers standalone WAR files (carying along Quercus). Sébastien focuses on Joomla on GlassFish but prefers the PHP/JavaBridge route even if it requires more configuration steps including a native PHP installation.

In JRuby on Rails land, Jacob has a two-part series on how to make the GlassFish jRubyOnRails runtime pooling more effective and the AI-logic available to other scripting technologies hosted in GlassFish as well.

A compilation of today's news of interest:

The first Milestone of NetBeans 6.5 is now Available for Download. This release includes support for Groovy, Ruby, Spring, Hibernate, JPA and more, and GlassFish v3. Check New and Noteworthy for full details, but, arguably one of the most important additions is PHP support. See Overview Screencast, Documentation and the NetBeans/PHP Blog.

New blogger! Siegfried Bolz is working on his Diplom-Informatiker in Computer Science in Munich and joined the blogosphere with a nice set of notes. His first entry shows how to run GlassFish v2 with Quercus (i.e. PHP5) on OpenSUSE 10.1. Given the earlier news on Frank and Ted, this seemed appropriate.

Note that OpenSUSE is not among the list of platforms where GlassFish is officially supported. But it just works.

Vivek has a new job: help make GlassFish (v2 and v3) the preferred platform for scripting on the server-side. What languages? JRuby for sure, but we want them all, from Groovy to PHP to Jython, to... Choosing the winner is hard, we want the winner to choose us!

Check Vivek's blog for his announcement, and for his first weekend project: a Ruby Plugin for Hudson. And contact him if you want to help with the effort!

Arun has two new writeups on PHP and GlassFish (and jMaki). In the first one he provides updated instructions on how to Run PHP on GlassFish using Quercus the PHP on JVM implementation. In the second he Adds jMaki widgets. Note that jMaki can also be used with Native PHP (see this story). You can read on earlier reports on PHP here.

One of the key benefits of Metro, the Web services stack in GlassFish, is basic Web services interoperability provided by JAX-WS RI and .NET 3.0 interoperability by Project Tango. Greek School Network is using it successfully with NuSOAP as well. Metro was chosen over Apache Axis and several other candidates. For the Java WS framework there were several candidates like Apache Axis and JAX-RPC but we choose JAX-WS 2.1, both because of its elegant programming model and the fact that in the newly published Java EE 6 proposal JAX-RPC will be proposed for future deprecation.

And the NetBeans Web services wizard is found to be very useful as well:

Our development platform was NetBeans 5.5 which provided a powerful wizard that starting from the WSDL that NuSOAP published, created the necessary Java stub code for our operations.

A variety of screencasts showing develop/deploy/invoke cycle of Web services using Metro and NetBeans are available here.

Over at the Sun Developer Network, Marina Sum has been on a tear this past week or so, with two articles on OpenSSO and its sister product, Sun Java System Access Manager. Last week, she and I published Single Logout: A Demo, a follow-up to February's article Switch on SAML for PHP With Project Lightbulb, covering Project Lightbulb's evolution into OpenSSO Extensions and its implementation of SAML 2.0 single logout. Much discussion of the mechanics of single logout and its implementation in the OpenSSO SAML 2.0/PHP Extension.

Today, Marina and Robert Skoczylas of Indigo Consulting published Developing Secure Applications with Sun Java System Access Manager, Part 1: Basic Authorization. This article, part 1 of a series, presents a case study of implementing authentication, single sign-on, and authorization at a fictional health-care insurance company. Great stuff, working from a high-level description of the problem right down to specific Access Manager customizations.

More WADL news from Thomas: the latest version of REST Compile can generate clients in Ruby and Python in addition to the original PHP. As before, the Web App is here (and the german version is here - no catalan yet :-]). Since we are Wadling..., check Paul's comments on its benefits and the documentation on RESTful Web Services in SWDP r2 - which also supports WADL.

Thomas is making progress with REST Compile and REST Describe. The latest release (0.2 - Web App, Source Bundle) includes a WADL editor and a generator for client code from WADL (PHP for now) as well as support for more WADL features. For more details on WADL check the web site, and these earlier TA entries; for details on REST compile and describe, check Thomas' entry.

WADL seems to be gaining traction. A bit too early, but I think WADL will be a winner, and things like Thomas' work is addressing both the value proposition (generating clients) and the cost (inference from existing messages). Looking forward to more examples of tools exploiting WADL (validators, for example...).

In the ever-growing list of GlassFish partners at CommunityOne (May 7th, less than 2 weeks away!), here is Caucho. Caucho's Quercus is a fast, 100% Java implementation of the PHP language allowing developers to use PHP flexibility for the web interface and Java for stability.

As previously highlighted by Ludo, Quercus works just fine on GlassFish v2 which opens the door for PHP developers to APIs such as JAX-WS/WSIT or JPA, to the EJB3 component model, and to GlassFish features such as load-balancing, administration, or clustering. Caucho will be at GlassFish Day to show exactly this: typical PHP applications running on a complete open source Java stack.

For an overview of GF Day check here; and, for a free registration, here. Stay tuned for more announcements.

Last week Ludo explained how to run MediaWiki on GlassFish using Quercus. Just after that, Alexis had success with phpBB using a different approach, via the -portbase feature. Also check David Herron's blog - he works in the JVM team is one of our "any language as long as it is the JVM underneath" guys - and this TSS thread.

PS. the main site for phpBB is down right now with a RAID failure; that's why my image is linking to the Wikipedia entry.

Following on from last week's entry on OpenID on OpenSSO, we rolled the new OpenID code into OpenSSO over the weekend and are today announcing OpenSSO Extensions (more detail in my blog entry at Superpatterns) - an incubator for OpenSSO. The OpenID code is there, as is the existing 'Lightbulb' SAML 2.0 PHP and a new Client SDK for OpenSSO implemented in PHP.

The idea is that, if you have an idea for a cool extension to OpenSSO, maybe a new authentication module or identity repository plugin, you can work on it in the OpenSSO community, with the code hosted in a 'sandbox' under the opensso/extensions tree. As extensions mature we'll look at migrating them into the OpenSSO core.