“Building Web apps from scratch using C or COBOL...”
There it is. Using COBOL never would have occurred to me for web pages. HTML and xHTML-CSS were enough.
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 was forced to do an interactive system in COBOL once (on an IBM mainframe). It had to have some subroutines done in BAL (assembly), but was mostly done in COBOL (with some REXX scripts supporting things). Those were the days.