Calling some DLL functions from within PHP (no ASP)

Hi! I need to call some functions that reside inside a .DLL supplied by a third party and which shall be used in our project (a web site mostly built with PHP but that will have to run on NT because of these .DLLs). We will not have access to the details of the implementations of DLL so that we are not able to port it to PHP. We shall call the functions from this DLL by instantiating an object and then calling the functions with the correct formatted parameters. The code inside an ASP file would be something like: <% ' --- activeX Dim Xvar Set Xvar = CreateObject("third_party_dll") ' --- vars parameter1, parameter2, etc. shall already have values ' as received from user input at a form or in a hardcoded manner output = Xvar.dll_function(parameter1, parameter2, ...) Set Xvar = Nothing %> I can make a PHP form and when the user submits it I would call the ASP file with the above Visual Basic snippet, and then format the HTML output. But I would like to invoke the above DLL function from inside PHP and have the result available at my PHP script instead of generating the HTML output from inside the ASP script. This is because our system already uses a complete architecture based in PHP (with templates and so on), so that the formatting of the output would be better built inside PHP. Any hints? TIA, Paulo