Skaldrom Sarg pointed us towards a new project he's been working on - an interface for PHP that allows it to use the UWA-Widgets from the NetVibes Universal Widget API system.
The PHP-UWA library allows a facilitated use of UWA-Widgets with PHP. It gives you access to the preferences and some convenience-functions. In theory, it should work with every UWA-compliant widget (even the broken ones which use html in the JS-Parts or the body). Mini-Apis do sometimes work too. An example is included.
You can see an example in this screenshot, try out a demo or just download the library and get testing.