Using J2EE and PHP together

An anonymous reader writes "There's an article in the May issue of the WebSphere Developer Technical Journal at IBM's developerWorks site on Pairing PHP with Java to meet the needs of a familiar web application scenario. The example consists of a Struts application deployed on WebSphere Application Server, which serves as the private content management tool, and a PHP 5 site to display that data to the public. Both parts of the application share a single Apache and DB2 instance."

Comments

PHP instead of JSP?

[UberChuckie]

The answer to the "Why would you want to do this?" section was pretty much "because you can" and that PHP is supposed to be easier to learn vs JSP. Doesn't JSP provide the same functionality as PHP? Given the fact that you would have to know Java to do the J2EE part, I don't see how the JSP part can be a problem.

It looked like a lot of work to get it running as well versus just dropping an EAR (or WAR) file and ask the app server to deploy it.

Re:Why bother with PHP ?

[Espectr0]

Just go the whole java way - use something like tapestry:httpjakartaapacheorgtapestry Throw away the the parameter parsing and the buggy nightmare that is scripting languages imbedded in html.

That's way too many frameworks. I just use one of them, it's called Freemarker, check it out. Lots of features, decent speed, very easy to use and great documentation. Sure puts JSP to shame. I used it on my forum software with ldap authentication (shameless plug) and it made my life easier.

Re:Wha...?

[FriedTurkey]

If you RTFA it isn't talking about JSP. It is about using Java in the middleware (WebSphere) and PHP in the presentation layer (Apache).

There is actually a lot of use for this as a web developer is often someone on a seperate team as the application business layer team.

Why should a PHP web site be rewritten in Java/JSP to use a existing Java middleware module?

Sure..

[Joff_NZ]

We've been using this mix ourselves for a little while now... the main core of the application is deployed on JBoss, where all the heavy processing occurs, with scheduled jobs etc running via Quartz

The web-based components that the users interact with are written in PHP5 - a decision that was not made based on any sort of execution speed differences that may or may not exist between PHP and JSP, but on the shorter development time we were going to have with PHP

Whole thing works very well :-)

I'm doing this already

[smartfart]

Well, almost. My client is purchasing a medical database application that runs on Tomcat and MySQL (save the flames, please), and I already have two projects planned that will add functionality that the vendor doesn't provide.

1. A sign-in kiosk in the patient waiting room for new patients to input their personal information (name, address, insurance provider,reason for visit, etc.).
2. An externally-accessible portal for the clinic's customers (they do a lot of occupational medicine) to view information regarding their employees that have been sent to the clinic for drug screens, injuries, etc.. The database vendor provides a hosted web portal for $100 per month, but it's limited in that each patient is required to have his own login, and only one patient is viewable at a time. This limits the employer's ability to view all the employee records, obviously.

My client was already sold on the system (they reviewed three competing products), and my promises of ease-of-extensiblilty utilizing PHP was icing on the cake :-)