Create page or use peramlinks to create dynamic content?

I’m not really sure this is the right forum to post this in…but, here goes anyway.

I’m testing this on a MAMP server (don’t know if that really matters, but though I would add it).

Also, this site is kind of a mixture of WordPress and non-wordpress content that I would like to display within the WordPress template that I’m using.

Basically the problem is this: I want to display data that is dependent on two user submitted variables (hereby variable1 and variable2). I will use these variables to grab information from a database (separate from WP), process it using PHP scripts that I write, and display it on the website.

I could just “rip” the wordpress theme look and stick it around my content, but I would prefer it to display within the theme so things like headers, sidebar, etc. get updated on these pages along with the wordpress pages on the site.

I’ve thought of two possible ways I might go about doing this, but I’m not sure if either would work:

One would be to create a page, and then try to append get variables to the end of it, create a custom page template, and just include the php files that are going to do the work. So the url would be like http://example.com/mypage/?variable1=this&variable2=that

It’s not very elegant, I think it could maybe work, but I would prefer to do the second option which is this:

To somehow use the permalinks to determine the two variables, ie, link to something that is like http://example.com/variable1/variable2/ which would then redirect (silently if possible, but if it can’t, that’s fine) to a single page that grabs the variables out of the permalink url and then does it’s stuff. This is one I’m more dubious about whether it can work, and if it can, how to go about doing it. I have a feeling one might have to do something in .htaccess so that the address above redirects to a single page, but it’d need to do it in a way where I would still have access to the variables in the URL once I hit the page.

I tried searching Google but I hadn’t really found anything that clearly addressed what I was trying to do yet. And I know this isn’t really a “wordpress problem,” more like a problem that happens to involve WordPress, but I’m kinda at a loss at how to perhaps go about doing it. Thanks.