In what web programming code is PayPal.com written?  ASP?  PHP?  A
combination of several?  Thanks for your help!

---

Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 21 Mar 2006 01:11 PST

lavidge...

From the source code on the pages I've been able to examine
(as a member, in addition to public pages), it seems that
Paypal is written in a later version of plain HTML. The 
HTML specified is HTML 4.01 'loose' DTD, which is a subversion
of HTML 4.

You can find authoritative information on HTML loose Document
Type Definition (DTD) 4.01 on this page from w3.org here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd

And you can explore HTML 4.0 and its subversions on this page,
including the advantages added in the 4.0 version:

"In addition to the text, multimedia, and hyperlink features of
 the previous versions of HTML (HTML 3.2 [HTML32] and HTML 2.0
 [RFC1866]), HTML 4 supports more multimedia options, scripting
 languages, style sheets, better printing facilities, and 
 documents that are more accessible to users with disabilities.
 HTML 4 also takes great strides towards the internationalization
 of documents, with the goal of making the Web truly World Wide."
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/


If the site included ASP and/or PHP aspects, you would find pages
with an extension of 'page.asp' and/or 'page.php'. I see no sign
of these in navigating the site.

Since I haven't explored every page on the site, I'll await your
feedback before posting this as an official answer, and collecting
the fee.

Let me know your thoughts...

sublime1-ga

---

Clarification of Question by lavidge-ga on 24 Mar 2006 19:42 PST

Yeah this is all VERY helpful.  To conclude if you could find any
articles on the Web that discuss the technical programming behind
PayPal.com it'd be greatly appreciated.  I'm then more than happy to
pay the fee.  Thanks!

php, perl, cgi or asp can and must be used at some point in paypal. It
has to use databases for its website for both the login details and
the transactional details. I would imagine since most businesses go
for the quick easy option of .NET that its ASP rather than php that is
used. Unlike what was mentioned .php and .asp does not have to be
declared. I have written a website before that displays html pages but
submits details via forms to php backends. its the main principle of a
login script or a contact page. There is also javascript involved. At
a guess because nobody without access to the storage area can tell for
certain it is main on:

ASP
Javascript
HTML

there is also cgi written in the perl language.

PayPal was bought by EBay some time ago
- so it seems logical that they are using the same setup

Yesterday, when I saw this, I had a good poke around EBay to see
whether I could find any clues about what they are really using to
generate the HTML

I also scoured the developers technical pages.

It is not so easy, as there is no reason why a large (or even small)
setup should use the standard extensions such as PSP, ASP, JSP etc

href="http://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/about-outside
href="http://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_contact_us

A lot of PayPal's main page looks like the above, 'webscr' is
obviously a despatcher of some sort.

My guess is that they have written something in-house, it is not hard to do.