How is babby.com formed?

November 12, 2009 1:42 PM

Is there a site out there that catalogues what technologies various web apps are built on?

I'm not interested in what web server a given site runs, and I know about the sites that track that. I'm more interested in the underlying technologies- languages, frameworks, databases, OS's- that power the (primarily) big sites out there.

Yes, I know this info is not easily deducible, but I'm curious if some group has gone to the trouble to make a "best guess" based on URL's, HTTP headers, and comments from employees.

posted by mkultra to computers & internet (6 answers total)

It's not just a list, but the High Scalability blog's "Example" category has plenty of detail on quite a few sites.
posted by gregjones at 2:38 PM on November 12, 2009

Builtwith has framework data, but who knows how accurate it is:
http://builtwith.com/?metafilter.com
posted by miniape at 3:01 PM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I just checked out builtwith for some sites I've built and it seems really accurate! How exciting!

Also most popular frameworks have examples of big websites that use their product. I know cakePHP, drupal, wordpress, movable type all have this.
posted by shownomercy at 3:34 PM on November 12, 2009

I'd probably start with High Scalability, which gregjones linked to. Builtwith.com is interesting, but there is only so much it can infer.

Any sites in particular that you are curious about? I've been accumulating bits and pieces in my brain, and my Google Notebook.
posted by Good Brain at 3:36 PM on November 12, 2009

Any sites in particular that you are curious about? I've been accumulating bits and pieces in my brain, and my Google Notebook.

General curiosity, but this was spurred on by my discovery that Facebook is running mySQL, of all things.
posted by mkultra at 12:15 PM on November 13, 2009

Facebook is also PHP on top, but my understanding is that PHP has long just been a sort of templating layer that talks to back-end services written in Java, Python and/or C/C++, and memcacheD is used extensively as a RAM cache. Their chat is built with erlang, and they have specialized data stores they've built like Cassandra.

Other big sites using mySQL, of all things: Google (AdSense/AdWords & YouTube), Wordpress.com, Flickr, Wikipedia (the last 3 are also PHP users).

Surprisingly large sites that you've probably never heard of that don't use mySQL: myYearbook.com & Hi5, which both use Postgres.

MySpace is pretty much all Microsoft, top to bottom.
posted by Good Brain at 8:58 PM on November 13, 2009