PHP needs to interact with Java Library. Suggestions?
 

I have been creating a web page that is based on PHP/Smarty. I have recently came to a realization that the web page will need to interact with a Java library. My problem is that the interaction is too detailed to create an executable with the JAR, and I am not sure how to go about interacting with this library. Basically, I have a list of user input in a PHP/Smarty form, that needs to be used in this java library. Any suggestions on how to do this? This is what I am thinking, but it seems a little unconventional:

Present the form to the user, when the user submits, it passes to Tomcat, which deals with the POST data, and interacts with the JAR file.

Any other ideas? Thanks.

There are a couple of ways to achieve what you want, however I must say up front I've never tried to integrate Java & PHP, however look up the chapter in the ever friendly PHP manual called: PHP / Java Integration. The introduction reads as follows:

"There are two possible ways to bridge PHP and Java: you can either integrate PHP into a Java Servlet environment, which is the more stable and efficient solution, or integrate Java support into PHP. The former is provided by a SAPI module that interfaces with the Servlet server, the latter by this Java extension.

The Java extension provides a simple and effective means for creating and invoking methods on Java objects from PHP. The JVM is created using JNI, and everything runs in-process."

I hope the chapter helps you.