The most popular (i.e., the most visited) websites have in common that they are dynamic websites. Their development typically involves server side coding, client side coding and database technology. The programming languages applied to deliver similar dynamic web content however vary vastly between sites.
| Website | Popularity (unique visitors)[1] |
Frontend (Client-side) |
Backend (Server-side) |
Database | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google.com[2] | 1,000,000,000 | HTML | C, C++, Java, Python, PHP | MySQL | "MapReduce" is programmed in PHP |
| Facebook.com | 880,000,000 | Ajax | PHP, C++, Java, Python, Erlang | MySQL | The Most visited social networking site |
| YouTube.com | 800,000,000 | Flash, Java, JavaScript | C, Python | MySQL | video sharing site |
| Yahoo | 590,000,000 | PHP | Ajax | MySQL | |
| Live.com | 490,000,000 | ASP.NET | |||
| MSN.com | 440,000,000 | ASP.NET | |||
| Wikipedia.org | 410,000,000 | PHP | MySQL | "MediaWiki" is programmed in PHP; free online encyclopedia | |
| Blogspot.com | 340,000,000 | Python | |||
| Bing | 230,000,000 | ASP.NET | JavaScript | ||
| Twitter.com | 160,000,000 | RoR, Scala, Java | C++ | 160 character social network | |
| Wordpress.com | 130,000,000 | PHP, JavaScript | uses JQuery library | ||
| Amazon.com | 110,000,000 | Java, J2EE | C++, Perl | ||
| eBay.com | 88,000,000 | Java, WebSphere, Servlets | Oracle Database | online auction house | |
| Linkedin.com | 80,000,000 | Java, Scala |
*data on programming languages are based on:
I don’t know how valid that list is. Where on Amazon’s site is anyone’s Java being pulled up to do something? I’ve never seen Java run for an Amazon function on my client, and I’ve been on there for years (and I’m in the top 2000 reviewers)
According to Steve Yegge, who works there, Google has four corporate-wide standard languages, and PHP is not among them:
One of the (hundreds of) cool things about working for Google is that they let teams experiment, as long as it's done within certain broad and well-defined boundaries. One of the fences in this big playground is your choice of programming language. You have to play inside the fence defined by C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript.
MapReduce (a Google invention) programmed in PHP? Not so. You may be able to use MapReduce or work-alikes from PHP, but MapReduce is not written in PHP.