You can do it with any serverside language, and any client side script should be able to get the query string indirectly from the page URL.

PHP does it through Zend, which does it through C++; and it's delivered into an application's environment by the server software; so clearly, you can access it using other means than only PHP.

I'm sure you meant something different; and I don't mean to bite your head off; but there's a full wealth of ways in which you can access that data, PHP is one way to do it.