What is the initiate browser in PHP like ROR?

* hitting a URL and getting it's content (php): $data = file_get_contents('http://api.somesite.com'); sources: http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5971398/php-get-contents-of-a-page * opens a new browser window (javascript) : "window.open(URL,name,specs,replace)" source: http://www.w3schools.com/jsref/met_win_open.asp * parsing a JSON string (php): $feed = json_decode($json); sources: http://php.net/manual/en/function.json-decode.php sources: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7889738/json-parsing-with-php