He clearly wants to loose.

I would not let any student touch PHP with a ten-foot pole, but your statement is false, no webserver need, you can run PHP from command line.

From living at an Iberic ex-colony in South America, I can assure you that regular military is as greedy and corrupt as any private one.

Lets suppose you have networks A and B. Given N cheap broadband connections on each side, lets call them A1, A2 ... A(N) and B1, B2 ... B(N)

At host A, for each A(N), B(N) pair, you set:
* a route for B(N)_IP via A(N)_Gateway
* a VPN link with source address A(N)_IP and destination B(N)_IP
* a static route for private networks behind B via each A(N)->B(N) virtual interface

Repeat for host B and each B(N), A(N) pair.

Problem: if each link has very distinct latencies, you will end up with package streams arriving at the other side heavily out of order. Tune your TCP stack accordingly.

I think OpenLaszlo is going to eat Flex and Silverlight lunch because it's multi-runtime.

The same code generates identical apps in DHTML, Flash or potentially any other runtime.

I dont know much about BIRT, but both tools seems to have very similar feature lists.

I know Jasper well, and I love iReport. It's 5 minutes to master if you are used to something like Crystal Reports. The jrxml format used by Jasper is very easy to generate from other tools.

I'm really a fanboy.

Check also Jasper Reports and iReport (http://jasperforge.org/). It's a Crystal Reports killer. It's Java, but I managed to write a small servlet which receives the jrxml path/filename and other parameteres via HTTP and it spits out the report in PDF, XML and other formats. That way I can integrate it with PHP or any other framework able to communicate using HTTP. Another interesting tool is OpenLazslo (http://www.openlaszlo.org/). It is a RAD (rich internet application) framework posed to compete with Macromedia Flex and Microsoft Silverlight. Unlike these two, Openlaszlo is multi-runtime, generating applications in DHTML, Flash and (potentially) even Silverlight.