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.

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.

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.

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.

GlassFish partner Caucho is featured in this blog comparing performance of Drupal (the popular content management platform) running on Apache 2+PHP and Caucho's Quercus (100% Java implementation of PHP5+extensions). Scripting on the JVM can offer load-balancing and clustering technologies (courtesy of GlassFish for instance) but it can also let you use the world of enterprise Java APIs. Here it seems to also demonstrate how Java's HotSpot JVM adaptive optimizations kick-in and provide better performance than "native" interpreters on a real-world application.

These tests were conducted all without caching enabled. Interestingly enough, comments suggest using Terracotta (another GlassFish partner) and EHCache, used by Greg Luck in the Wotif.com architecture.

See this post by Ludo to get the Quercus interpreter running on GlassFish.

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.

The Quercus team delivered it, Ludo checked it out, and it works! Quercus 3.1 (WAR, ReadMe, WebSite) now installs on GlassFish and will run simple hello world apps, complex examples like MediaWiki and other PHP goodies like jMaki. The List of Supported PHP Apps includes some very popular PHP solutions. Ludo has detailed instructions, including settings for JDK6 and JDK5. Note that Quercus runs only interpreted under GlassFish; it seems the compiler mode still has Resin-specific dependencies. Altogether, a very nice solution. It will be interesting to see whether the Quercus team continues to expand from a Resin-only implementation to one that works in multiple containers.