Using Java server-side with PHP-generated front-end

Question

 Does anyone have a real-world experience in building such a project? I'd like to move away questions about "is it good idea or not", but focus on possible solutions. I see one simple way - HTTP GET/POST + xml/json - and one more elegant - AJAX/DWR. As for the first one - I understand that it is possible, but needs quite a lot coding. As for second way - is it possible to use Java DWR engine with PHP front-end? Is DWR language-independent for client side (as it uses just JavaScript)?
 Would it be a problem, that client page was generated by one web server (for example, apache+php) and served on server-side by another (for example, tomcat)? I suspect, that Tomcat will complain about sessions. Can this problem be fixed with allowing cross-domain AJAX?
Thank you in advance.
Denis.

Answer 1

If what you want to do is (as I suspect) to use PHP to assemble your web pages while the "business logic" is written in Java, I would suggest using PHP/Java Bridge (LGPL and MIT licenses)

Answer 2

Both Java and PHP are server-side technologies. Your "front-end" will be written using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript - although you could certainly use PHP (or JSP) templates to render portions of the front-end.

If you are using PHP as the "front-end", then you would need it to act as a proxy, passing requests back to the Java web server.