Detecting the underlying solution of a social website [closed]

Question

Just judging from the html source, can one tell the underlying solution of a website? For example, what techniques are used for http://foursquare.com/? PHP+MySQL?

Answer 1

It uses Scala/Lift

Answer 2

You commented:

Thanks for your reply Brian. We are starting our new Social website and try to find the best scalable solution. Foursquare is a successful example so we want to follow it.

This is not a very good approach. There are successful social networks using virtually every common web language and database backend. PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, etc. ... MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, etc.

A specific technology almost certainly won't make-or-break your site. You should be picking the best technology that fits your specific needs and your development team's expertise, not picking based on what Foursquare (or any other site) picked.

Answer 3

I don't think you could necessarily tell from the HTML source, unless it had some sort of metadata in it that gave it away. You could try instead to look at the HTTP response headers that come over the wire when you request a page, since most server-side platforms will self-identify in HTTP headers by default unless the server admin explicitly disables them. As for the database platform, that would be really difficult to tell regardless of the platform, since just about any server-side app code platform (PHP, ASP.NET, Java, etc) is interoperable with just about any database platform.

Out of curiosity, why do you want to know this?

Answer 4

You can check the headers of the returns...

example for foursquare.

Server is: nginx

http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=httphead&host=foursquare.com

Answer 5

Originally Foursquare was written in PHP, however, due to performance problems it was re-written in Scala / Lift a while ago.

Answer 6

And as they detailed last time the whole thing crashed, their data is all in MongoDB.