Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Integrating Orkut with other Google services

I see that the URL of Orkut's homepage is http://orkut.com/Home.aspx. .aspx is the extension for ASP.NET webpages. This means Orkut is using .NET. But Orkut is owned by Google, and Google runs on Linux.

Netcraft says http://orkut.com was running Microsoft-IIS on Solaris 8 when last queried at 8-Jul-2004 05:14:18 GMT.

Microsoft-IIS on Solaris 8?!
  • Well ok, they could be having some of their application logic residing in ASP.NET hosted in IIS running on Windows, and they could be having some web-server proxy running on Solaris/Linux
  • Or, they could even be using ASP.NET running on Mono hosted in a web-server that appears to be IIS. Mono could be running on Solaris 8.

  • Google is working to build a host of new services like Gmail and Google Groups. Gmail and Google groups are integrated in the sense that I can use the same account across Gmail and Google Groups. But not Orkut. Going further, they will certainly want to integrate all of their services. At that point, the fact that they are using ASP.NET for Orkut will make them hit some roadblocks. And that is what gets me interested!

    Or, they could be using an .aspx extension to fool people. Could they? :-)