PHP Tutorial PHP : Hypertext Preprocessor . It is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language that lets web developers to create dynamic web pages. PHP is an alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Page (ASP) technology. As with ASP, the PHP script is embedded within a Web page along with its HTML. Before the page is sent to a user that has requested it, the Web server calls PHP to interpret and perform the operations called for in the PHP script.