We need to handle events from scripts running on Linux and Windows
servers. After a brief search we've decided that the best support is
offered by PHP (as an aside, does anyone know of a Firebird module for
Perl?).
Having never developed in PHP, is there any advice or tips anyone wants
to offer?

The basic script would be started by cron, register an event handler,
and then wait until the handler executed and notified the main thread it
was done, or the main thread reached a timeout threshold, deregistered
the event handler and exited.

I also want to make sure we're running a minimum install of PHP, as it
won't be used for HTTP traffic.

Thanks, Rick DeBay