PHP founder backs Facebook's HipHop technology PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is dominant in the realm of server-side Web application development: It's used on more than 81 percent of websites using server-side languages , according to W3Techs.com, which gathers data about the use of Web technologies. The language's creator, Rasmus Lerdorf, recently appeared at the DevBeat conference in San Francisco, where he gave a thumbs-up to Facebook's HipHop source code transformer for PHP . "If they get it general-purpose enough, maybe eventually that could become the next engine for PHP," he said. Having a JIT (just-in-time compiler) like the HipHop VM in PHP "is certainly a possibility, and yes, I do like what these guys are doing. But it isn't something that is close. It would be a couple years out at least still." Another variety of JIT technology also might wind up in PHP, he said. Lerdorf, a distinguished engineer at e-commerce vendor Etsy,...