[newbie] Equivalent to PHP?

[Gilles]

On Tue, 12 Jun 2012 22:01:10 +1000, Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com>
wrote:
>Apache's mod_php partially evens out the difference, but not
>completely, and of course, it's perfectly possible to write a dispatch
>loop in PHP, as Octavian said.

It looks like mod_php and equivalents for web servers other than
Apache are anecdotal compared to solutions based on standalone web
servers. Is that the case? Why is that?