I'm attempting to create a NodeJS + Express (currently + Handlebars) app that serves web pages using data from FirebaseIO. However, I have a personal preference for programming in PHP, and, in many cases, it's more optimal for my use case, mostly because of its inline style. FirebaseIO, though, does not support PHP and it's REST API only does database requests (and not other things such as storage or Auth).
What I am interested in doing is have NodeJS + Express receive requests, then pass them on, along with variables Node has retrieved from Firebase, to PHP. PHP would process the request and the variables given it by Node and return a web page which would be sent back to the client via Node.
I'm looking for something extremely stable though (I noticed a couple libraries on GitHub that promise to do this, but they all seemed to be in beta or experimental phases).
If it's not possible to do what I've described, is there any other way to have PHP generate the web pages using variables attained by NodeJS? I'm guessing one way is to add Node on another port of my server and query it using CURL, but wouldn't this have implications for the speed of requests?
Please elaborate and suggest as many paths forward as you can think of.
