Hiveminds Magazine has a recent post about bridging the gap between PHP and Java with the help of the Tomcat add-on for Apache.

Want to run PHP and access Java? Here's how to do it on Windows XP using Apace and Apache Tomcat. Apache Tomcat is a Servlet container developed at the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Tomcat implements the Java Servlet and the JavaServer Pages (JSP) specifications from Sun Microsystems, and provides a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java code to run.

They go with the XAMPP distribution for the web server setup (for simplicity rather than on a unix-based system) and include the configuration and installation procedures to get everything up and running (screenshots included).