Often when PHP people talk about Perl, they refer to using it with the CGI. CGI is, well, a bit old. It might do what you want, but it turns out that PHP beats Perl via CGI hands down because PHP is actually mod_php and built directly into your Apache web server.

.....What? You still use CGI even when you use mod_perl. CGI is the Common Gateway Interface, the way Web clients pass data such as form entries to an application on a server. Whether your interpreter is running inside the web server or outside, you're still using CGI.