On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial looking at combining the Zend Server (Community Edition) with the Java Print Service to make printing in your applications (something PHP's not very good at) simpler.

What if you still need to have printing support in your PHP application? With Zend Server, Zend's integrated PHP application stack, the answer might be not what you were expecting. Use the PHP Java Bridge, available in both the community and commercial editions of Zend Server.

Their method combines Java code with some native PHP code to create a "printer" and point your scripts to it. Various options and configuration file information are included as well as two scripts - one to make a simple "one image" document and another to make a more complex PDF containing an interactive form.