Articolo completo su High Scalability

Ecco alcune domande rivolte a Joseph Smarr (technical lead on the Google+ team):

What software technology stack does Google+ use?
Our stack is pretty standard fare for Google apps these days: we use Java servlets for our server code and JavaScript for the browser-side of the UI, largely built with the (open-source) Closure framework, including Closure's JavaScript compiler and template system. A couple nifty tricks we do: we use the HTML5 History API to maintain pretty-looking URLs even though it's an AJAX app (falling back on hash-fragments for older browsers); and we often render our Closure templates server-side so the page renders before any JavaScript is loaded, then the JavaScript finds the right DOM nodes and hooks up event handlers, etc. to make it responsive (as a result, if you're on a slow connection and you click on stuff really fast, you may notice a lag before it does anything, but luckily most people don't run into this in practice). Our backends are built mostly on top of BigTable and Colossus/GFS, and we use a lot of other common Google technologies such as MapReduce (again, like many other Google apps do).

Why GWT technology has not used in Google+?
Nothing against GWT, but the engineers who started building Google+ didn't use it, and in general projects end up all-GWT or no-GWT, and this was the latter.

What did you code the server-side? java? jsp? gwt? guice? I would be especially intrigued if any Go snuck in there
Lots of Java, no JSP, no GWT, lots of Guice, no Go. :)