what are the benefits of using java bridge for php? Is it ready/stable for production environment, is there a "best approach" to how installing it/managing it?
You can take advantage of good existing Java software, using your PHP application.
Three good examples I can think of right now are Lucene (free text indexing), BIRT (business intelligence/charts), and RapidMiner or Weka (datamining/ai/machine learning)