Ebay[1] Starts in 1995, initial name AuctionWeb (V1) : - very simple architecture - based on perl - no database, for data persistence they used plain files Because of rapid growth they needed to improve their architecture and so V2 (clever name) was born: - replaced perl with C/C++ - started using a database in a master-slave configuration - C++ back-end - XSLT front-end Any request will lead to an XML file being created in C++ and the XLST processor will transform that into html. *pretty sophisticated architecture for the 90s, XLST was cutting-edge back then* That hold out pretty well for a while but in the late 90s ebay experienced an exponential growth. They started having some trouble with outages and needed improvements, so V3 was developed: - based on java - search engine still used C++ - proof that relational databases can scale (aggressive caching) - developed a messaging layer for making a lot of asyncronious calls, they actually ended up being sued because of the delay in which images appear on the site after an item gets posted :-) - although they switched to java the basic principle of generating xml files for each request was still used. Combining the need for a multilingual website with the boom of AJAX technologies and flash applications they started to doubt their XSL system and moved on to what became in 2006 V4 of ebay: - remove everything that could be replaced with java, Ebay loves Java Everything is Java (Code): - Image - Java class - Link - Java class - Javascript - Java classes - Content - Java classes => lot's of code to write, they're using Eclipse for developing. For more details check: Eclipse at Ebay Tailoring Eclipse to the eBay architecture [1] Images and ideas/info are from the links above.