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Technology proposal: add a "Not identified" server-side language

corbacho on 5 April 2013, 12 years ago

What is your methodology to identify the server-side language? Is it only the "x-powered-by" HTTP header ?

That header is normally used by PHP and ASP.NET but not other server-side languages.

To make a more useful comparison, I would suggest to add a "Unknown" server-side language to the chart, to see what's the relative numbers. 

Matthias Gelbmann on 6 April 2013, 12 years ago

Hi corbacho,

We use the powered-by header as one of the indicators, but we have many more. We use many other HTTP headers, and we use hints that we find in the HTML pages. Furthermore, we make use of other technologies that we identify to conclude which language is used. For example, if we detect a Drupal site, we know it is based on PHP. If we detect Ruby on Rails, we know it is Ruby, even if there are no HTTP headers that show it. In total, we have a few thousand technology indicators, many of them can be used - directly or indirectly - to determine the server-side language.

The number of sites where we don't identify any language is relatively small. The reason why we don't include it in the statistics is, that we want to show shifts in the relative popularity of technologies, not distorted by changes in our abilities to detect them.

corbacho on 8 April 2013, 12 years ago

Thank for your detailed answer Matthias.  The request for this feature, came after a discussion in my blog http://drupalmotion.com/article/php-not-dead#disqus_thread

You should add these details to your "methodology" FAQ,  it's useful.

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