Java.net runs on PHP, and other surprises of our technology research

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 11 May 2011 in News, Java, PHP

Our website technology analyzer discovers the technologies used by a website. One of the things I look up occasionally are the technologies used by the technology providers themselves on their sites. Often, one can see them using pre-released versions of their tools or special builts. This is what I would normally expect. Sometimes, however, there are real surprises.

This is a little compilation of some of the more unexpected results.

• Java.net runs on Drupal - that means it uses PHP. Seemingly, they like Drupal more than all the Java based content management systems. Perhaps, that is due to Drupal's flexibility to allow experienced developers to easily merge code with content. That would be PHP code, of course. To be fair, Java.net is a large site, and they also use Java on parts of it.

• Yahoo.com uses DoubleClick. Yahoo has its own advertising network, even a couple of them due to acquisitions. Nevertheless, someone found that it would be wise to also use a Google service for its advertising needs. Possibly, they just want to compare the performance of the competitors with their own, but one would expect them to find a less visible site within their property for such tests.

• While we are at it: Apple.com also pushes some money towards Google via DoubleClick, but at least they are only competing in the mobile advertising world.

• Adobe.com owns a nice little JavaScript framework called Spry. It is not one of the main players in that field, but at least it is used by 0.6% of all sites. Not too bad. Adobe itself stopped using it recently and switched to jQuery.

• Similarly, Microsoft.com started to use jQuery instead of their own ASP.NET Ajax framework. They are still using Windows, for whatever reason.

• Wordpress.org is the home of the most popular content management system. People say that WordPress started as a blogging engine, but has developed since then into a full-fledged content management system, used by many large sites. Obviously, it does not satisfy the needs of its own website, because it is not being used there.
  Update: As a commentator pointed out, WordPress is actually used on some parts of the site.

• Usage of the open source web server AOLserver is declining. Its own site Aolserver.com is powered by Apache, after they have tried Nginx before. Looks like they are still searching for a good alternative.

• The fact that Fedoraproject.org uses the Red Hat Linux distribution instead of Fedora for its site is almost understandable, considering that they are sponsored by them. Still, it's not quite the same.

Besides these cases of plain non-dogfooding, we have also discovered a milder variant of refusing your own product, namely by using an out-dated version.

• Php.net uses a release candidate of PHP version 5.2.12. That version has been released in 2009. There seems to be no need for the 5.3 improvement. Interestingly, Java.net uses the quite new PHP 5.3.5.

• One thing we learn at the Typo3.com website is that version 4.2, originally released in 2008, has reached end of life and users are strongly advised to upgrade all installations of that content management system. They should distribute such notes to their own webmaster.

• The oldest version we found on a technology provider site is Ruby 1.8.5 released in 2006 and currently powering Ruby-lang.org.

I would like to say that these discoveries don't tell us anything about the quality of the products and services mentioned here. I'm sure they all have perfectly valid reasons for their technology decisions. They are all professionals in the field, after all.

Nevertheless, I feel it is also about sending wrong signals to users. People say that a company's website is the most important sales representative. Now imagine a BMW sales rep driving to a meeting in a Lexus. It doesn't really matter anymore what he says in the meeting, his potential clients already have come to a conclusion.

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4 comments

Anonymous user on 12 May 2011

"The tailor's wife is the worst clad"

Tim on 12 May 2011

I'd like to make a comment about the use of WordPress on the WordPress.org site. What kind of analysis do you actually do to determine that? Some parts of their sites may not be, like the Codex which is running MediaWiki, however their showcases section is being run off of a WP install. Their main page is actually pointing to jQuery installed in a wp-includes subdirectory. I think just because they don't have a generator tag listing WP that doesn't mean anything. A common security practice is to not even include a generator tag for security reasons.

Reply by author Matthias Gelbmann on 13 May 2011

Thank you, Tim, for sharing your observations. We look for a number of clues for determining the technologies of a site. The generator meta tag is one of them, but not the only one. The existence of a subdirectory, from which an unrelated file is included is normally not sufficient. As you certainly know, a normal WordPress installation does look different, using things such as plugins and themes. However, their showcase page indeed looks like WordPress. We missed that one, because we don't crawl all the pages of a site.

Cay Horstmann on 13 May 2011

It is indeed embarrassing that java.net runs on PHP. It would be one thing if it ran well, but sadly it has all sorts of problems. Apparently they could not find a Java CMS that beats a really poor PHP solution.