This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz
by Alan Williamson.
Original Post: eBAY: Powered by Microsoft
Feed Title: Technical @ alan.blog-city.com
Feed URL: http://www.ibm.com/us/en/
Feed Description: (Technical) the rants of a java developer trapped in the body of a java developer!
Surfing around eBAY this evening I noticed the SUN logo up in the top corner of all the pages proudly stating that the site was powered by Sun Solaris. Click on it and a small pop-up window appears bestowing the virtures of Solaris, Java and their low-cost hardware setup. I thought to myself very cool, Java being used in a high profile site. A shining example of what J2EE can really do.  My pride was short lived. If you were to look at the actual headers coming back from the eBAY servers you'll discover something quite different; not Solaris or Java ... but Microsoft's IIS server!
Response Headers - http://www.ebay.co.uk/
Content-Length: 6104
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Location: http://www.ebay.co.uk/index.html
Last-Modified: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:24:28 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Etag: "0a679e43ff0c41:8d3e"
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
IISExport: This web site was exported using IIS Export v2.2
Set-Cookie: etfc=40101054; path=/; domain=ebay.co.uk; Expires=Sun, 01-Jan-2006 20:38:52 GMT
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2005 20:38:51 GMT
Connection: close
The plot gets a little thicker. Clicking on the www.ebay.com site you discover the 'Powered By IBM' logo taking the place of the Sun logo. Maybe their backend servers are running Solaris/IBM and for whatever reason, eBAY have chosen Microsoft to power their frontend servers. Yet, they don't seem to be shouting about it in the same way they are with IBM and SUN. I would assume that SUN/IBM have given eBAY a huge amount of money to be positioned in such a popular piece of online real-estate with Microsoft declining the opportunity to shout about their eBAY involvement. Instead they are just getting on with the job of actually delivering the pages.
I assume that J2EE and IBM are being used somewhere in the site and it got me thinking that the eBAY technical story would be a fascinating one to sit down and listen to. How are they merging all these technologies together? How is .NET performing compared to J2EE? Why the mix? So many questions, and its only the first of the year!
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Surfing around eBAY this evening I noticed the SUN logo up in the top corner of all the pages proudly stating that the site was powered by Sun Solaris. Click on it and a small pop-up window appears bestowing the virtures of Solaris, Java and their low-cost hardware setup. I thought to myself very cool, Java being used in a high profile site. A shining example of what J2EE can really do.  My pride was short lived. If you were to look at the actual headers coming back from the eBAY servers you'll discover something quite different; not Solaris or Java ... but Microsoft's IIS server!
The plot gets a little thicker. Clicking on the