My sister’s been shopping around for airline tickets to go to Asia without any luck. So, the geekness in me felt the need to help her out.
Scanning through some blogs I read regularly, I came across SideStep.com. It is one of the “newer” travel websites that search a lot of other websites’ flight information, which got me curious as to what technology they use.
Watching what other people/companies are doing and using helps me stay up-to-date with all these technologies.
I initally wasn’t able to figure out what technologies drive their website until I:
- Used Steve Gibson’s excellent ID Serve tool to find out what web server they were using
- Looked for file extensions and came across the .do extension on one of their links.
- Checked out the HTML code and scanned for methods that buttons and other input controls were calling.
So, for the web server, it’s none other than Apache (yeah!):
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:32:05 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://www.sidestep.com/
Content-Length: 294
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
For the back-end, it’s Java, most likely an Apache Struts implementation:
And of course, a ton of JavaScript code for client-side functionality.
From this brief investigation, I also learned that SideStep.com, though, a new comer is giving Orbitz and Expedia a run for their money. Cool! Better for us consumers.
To summarize: Try to regularly observe what other people and companies are doing, so as to keep yourself up-to-date. And along with that, try the techniques I mentioned above for your investigation, as you might learn a thing or two. =0)
Disclaimer: There are a lot of other techniques and tools that you can use, but the steps above, though, may be incomplete served the purpose of this post.