Web Technology Stack [Analysis]

Even wondered what technologies are used for large web applications which have millions of unique visitors and have 1000s of requests per second. Which programming languages are making it happen, handling such peak amount of load at a time. We were curious about it and thought lets figure out what beneath the nice slick interface, who is handling the business logic efficiently. Here is what we found, a compiled list of technologies stack used at various web applications.

 

Product	Front End	Back end	Database	Others
Twitter	Ruby on Rails (RoR), JavaScript, jQuery LabJS, Modernizr, JSON-P, oEmbed	Scala	Cassandra	Java, C, Python, Mustache templating language
Facebook	PHP, XHP, Hiphop for PHP, JavaScript	C, C++, Java	Cassandra, MySQL	Python, Erlang
LinkedIn	JSP, Apache Coyote Web Server	Spring MVC, Linkedin spring, grails,	Oracle and MySQL	ActiveMQ for JMS, Lucene as a foundation for search, DWR, Jetty, Eh-cache, Quartz, Spring remoting.
YahooMail	HTML, CSS, JavaScript (with YUI 3)	PHP	MySQL	Apache Traffic Server (formely known as Yahoo! Traffic Server).
Google +	Closure framework, including Closure’s JavaScript compiler and template system, HTML5 History API	Closure templates server-side, C++, Java, or Python	BigTable and Colossus/GFS	MapReduce
FourSquare	scala(lift framework)	scala Amazon S3 for hosting, /img/ folder which is served by nginx directly	MongoDB	load balancer(s): nginx/0.8.52 Lift- A web framework written in scala.
Youtube	Python	psyco, a dynamic python->C compiler	MySQL
Quora	Python and JavaScript	LiveNode/webnode2, Thrift (Communicate to backend) Amazon EC2 and S3 for hosting	MySQL + memcached	C++ Load Balancing: nginx in front of HAProxy
Viddler	PHP, Python	Rails 2.x, ffmpeg/mencoder/x264lib, Java 1.6 / Spring / Hibernate / ehcache, Erlang Amazon EC2 and S3 for hosting	Mysql 5.0	Hadoop HDFS (distributed video source storage) Nginx/Keepalived (Load balancers for all web traffic) Wowza (RTMP video recording server) Mediainfo(reporting video metadata) Yamdi (metadata injector for flash videos) Puppet(configuration management) Logcheck(log scanning) Duplicity(backup)
StackOverFlow	jQuery, ASP .NET	C#, Microsoft ASP.NET (version 4.0), ASP.NET MVC 3, Razor.	LINQ to SQL, some raw SQL Server	HAProxy (for load balancing), Bacula(for backup), Redis(caching layer)
Disqus	jQuery,EasyXDM, Sammy, Flot, Raphaël, JSHint	Python scripts, Django, Celery, South	PostgreSQL, memcached	HAProxy + heartbeat (Load balancing)

 

In Short..

Conclusion

The current trends for front end development are mainly jQuery, Python, Scala. Though some companies use Microsoft technologies but, the percentage of such companies is very less. Although MySQL and Cassandra has been favorites databases but few are moving to MongoDB which is a NoSQL database. Back end of these high scaling sites run on variety of different technologies such as Django, python, RoR, Closure, C++, Java, Scala etc.

I’ve written this post to give insights about which technology combinations are preferred by websites with high user base, you might want to consider these points while choosing platforms and programming languages for your start-up.

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http://www.tutkiun.com/2011/07/web-technology-stack-analysis.html