
TYPO3 is a web application programmed in PHP, but it is not an application in the usual sense (Windows, Mac or Linux). In other words: TYPO3 is installed on a webserver alongside PHP, and you work with it through a web browser, like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, or you "run" TYPO3 on the server.
To run TYPO3 successfully there are some requirements for both server and client (user) that must be met.
High-performance setups will want to make use of load-balancing and use the staging/static HTML-export capability of TYPO3. There are various third-party extensions which implement static file caching in the extension repository.
Optional - but recommended - webserver software extras:
Further individual extensions may require further software to be available. For instance the AWstats extension is based on Perl and the Indexed Search engine uses "pdftotext" and "catdoc" for indexing PDF and Word documents.
For more information regarding system requirements please have a look at TYPO3.org