Orkut is one of the most popular social networking site in India, other popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter are not that popular as of Orkut amongst Indians. India is 2nd on second position when it comes to orkut users.
Recently I learned ASP.Net, Its really nice technology for web application development. Google’s Orkut is ASP.Net application. But i just seen the webserver details of Orkut, they are running linux OS !!. I just shocked to see the working of ASP.Net on linux platform. So i did a bit research for it.
There exists one open source .Net development framework for Open source lovers, named MONO. Most probably Google is using Mono on their Linux servers to run the ASP.Net application.
According to Wikipedia,
Mono is a free and open source project led by Novell to create an Ecma standard compliant, .NET-compatible set of tools, including among others a C# compiler and a Common Language Runtime. Mono can be run on Linux, BSD, UNIX, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows operating systems.
We can also use .htaccess file of linux servers to give any extension to serving pages to fool the users, this might be the case with orkut, but the WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg have seen many ASP.Net error pages on orkut in early days of orkut. (Ignore fatal error on Matt’s blog). so we can say that Google is orkut using ASP.Net for Orkut.
Google’s survey site i.e. survey.googleratings.com is using Microsoft IIS to serve the dynamic ASP.Net pages, so will Google use the ASP.Net technology in future for few more products ? It will be really interesting to see whats next.
Nov 27, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Google uses their own web servr named GFE.
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Nov 27, 2009 at 12:04 pm
yup I too noticed that orkut is build with ASP as they do not have their own language they need to rely on others .
Google is against Microsoft still it use its resources .
Strange but true
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Chetan Replied:
December 17, 2009 at 3:52 pm
@Ashish Kalmegh, Now we can say that they are not using their resources, ASP.Net development tools are free from M$ and they are using open source tools to deploy and run the .Net framework so its totally free for them now.
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Nov 27, 2009 at 10:44 pm
in which the india popular among the orcut facebook? kalo di Indonesia facebook is the most popular. my blogging world’s migrants, an honor if you can exchange links with you. thanx
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Nov 29, 2009 at 12:09 am
they are running on Linux.. But not with MONO.. they have their own server.. GWS/GFE.. So they are using asp.net from 2004.. quite long time..
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Nov 30, 2009 at 11:34 am
Nice find Chetan.
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Nov 30, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Excellent topic, never thought about it. Thanks for sharing.
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Dec 3, 2009 at 9:48 am
I know that Orkut is using ASP.Net because of it’s file extension .aspx.But i didnt know that we can run ASP on Linux and it has a open source version.Really nice strategy.I am tweeting it…
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Dec 4, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Nice find indeed. I have been using orkut for such a long time & I never knew this. I could never imagine google using ms technologies..quite strange.
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Mar 8, 2010 at 8:55 pm
great finding chetan
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