persistent CGI pattern at google.com (was why python?)

[Mark Rowe]

On Nov 20, 2004, at 12:56 AM, francois lepoutre wrote:

> Hi all,
>
>> Google itself is a python success story - for example this here:
>>  https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?topic=102
>
> Sure, it looks like google.com is using some kind of
> cgi process to run python code. Kind of good news
> for those selling python-based stuff.
>
> I expect google use some sort of persistency layer
> (mod_python, fastcgi ...) to run their python cgi code
> effectively.
>
> Anyone knows the way their python code is delivered
> at adwords ?

The HTTP headers returned from the above URL look something like:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Mathopd/1.5p3
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Set-Cookie: N_T=; path=/; domain=adwords.google.com;expires=Thursday, 
01-Jan-1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: N_T=; path=/; expires=Thursday, 01-Jan-1970 00:00:00 GMT
Set-Cookie: N_T=v=1&c=1f3ebd18&s=419de707&t=T:0:102; path=/support; 
domain=adwords.google.com
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:28:55 GMT

Mathopd (<http://www.mathopd.org/>) is "a very small, yet very fast 
HTTP server for UN*X systems".


Further on in the HTML we see  """<META name="type" 
content="topic.cs">""".  The topic.cs portion of that tag suggests to 
me that ClearSilver (<http://www.clearsilver.net/>) is being used for 
the templating of the page.  A little digging around the ClearSilver 
site finds this interesting snippet 
(<http://www.clearsilver.net/examples.hdf>):  "Here are some examples 
of websites and applications built today using ClearSilver. The host 
programming language is also listed:  ...  Google Groups 2 - The new 
version of Google Groups uses ClearSilver. (C++/Python)".

None of this directly addresses your question with regards to the 
"persistency layer" that they use, but it does provide relatively 
strong evidence of the Python-related technologies that they are using 
for user-visible portions of their services.

Regards,

Mark Rowe
<http://bdash.net.nz/>