I know that these sites like eHarmony, Facebook, etc. incorporate javascript and other stuff, but are the meat and potatoes of these complex sites built with PHP and MySQL?

Generally yeah, PHP or ASP .. Mostly PHP

Originally Posted by lynxus

Generally yeah, PHP or ASP .. Mostly PHP

Interesting. I was reading this article on Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) recently on CNN.com I think it was (very good article, highly recommend to everyone) and it mentioned how he used to put in heavy coding sessions late at night building facebook. Please excuse my newbie-ness, but how long does it take a SINGLE person to code/build a site that sophisticated? Seems crazy

The front end may be PHP but the backend of the bigger ones are real applications that run in the server context.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

The front end may be PHP but the backend of the bigger ones are real applications that run in the server context.

Let me apologize for what is probably another senseless newb question, but I thought PHP was a backend code that ran on the server side?

Originally Posted by Frank Drebin

Interesting. I was reading this article on Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) recently on CNN.com I think it was (very good article, highly recommend to everyone) and it mentioned how he used to put in heavy coding sessions late at night building facebook. Please excuse my newbie-ness, but how long does it take a SINGLE person to code/build a site that sophisticated? Seems crazy

The site wasn't always as complicated as it is now. I doubt that he's responsible for most or any of the code anymore.

PHP is a script language that is interpreted by lanuage modules/application that has limits in the time a script can be running for.

To make something truly robust and fast PHP is used as a messenger to and from "real" application.

Originally Posted by Frank Drebin

Let me apologize for what is probably another senseless newb question, but I thought PHP was a backend code that ran on the server side?

For a lot of sites, PHP is probably the only backend language. However, for some high traffic sites, some of the more intensive operations are performed by another layer beneath PHP.

Facebook, for example, is written using PHP, but they use a custom version of it called HipHop, which basically converts the code into C++, which will run faster. Their chat application is written using Erlang.

YouTube was originally written in PHP, but when Google bought it, they rewrote it using Python, though I think this was more because Google doesn't use PHP than that PHP couldn't handle it.

If you're interested in the architecture of some of the more popular sites around the web, check out a website called High Scalability.

Ebay was originally written in ASP and was then compiled into DLLs which run as ISAPI applications.

Usually they are all PHP and MySQL driven. Although facebook and others do incorporate AJAX, Javascript..etc