development & zend

I am sure this has been asked dozens of times so please forgive if this is repetitive. I have an application from which I would like to incorporate running scripts. I saw that I can pass files to php.exe but this is more for a batch process and so my application wouldn't have access to any script scope variables. What I want to do is to load a script, run portions every few seconds and read changed varibles so as to alter the behaviors of the application in time. I've looked at incorporating use of the php DLL but could find no documentation for the many functions exposed. Is Zend API what I should be looking at? Any input would be greatly appreciated. TIA Brian