I'd like to share three observations about PHP's JAVA extension that might help others save some time:
1) On Redhat 7.3, with Apache 1.3.27 and PHP 4.3.2, I did not get to work PHP with Suns JDK 1.4.0_01 (Apache crashes), but JDK 1.4.2 works.
2) Calling a JAVA application with an exec call to a shell script seems considerably faster than accessing the same functionality with the JAVA extension. For example calling Fop with the JAVA extension can take 30 seconds on the same file, where the shell script from the Fop distribution (called from PHP with exec) takes 20 seconds.
3) When I recompile a Java class, it seems that the running httpd process, keeps the class file somewhere in cache, because I had to restart apache, before my PHP script, actually called the freshly compiled class.
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