Is Google Docs developed by JavaScript?

It is developed in Javascript.

Javascript is (generally) only used for client-side scripting, and although Google Docs uses Javascript on the client-side it wouldn’t be used on the server.

I believe original development was done on ASP.NET however some of the code would probably have been re-written—this would be a guess but I suspect the documents code is a mix of Java, ASP.NET, PHP using Oracle as the db, again though that’s a bit of a guess.

Correct me if I’m wrong…

Javascript can be used for serverside requests. That is what AJAX is/does.

I am 100% positive that ASP.NET was not used as Google is a big proponent of OpenSource. As I am positive that the DB is not Oracle either.

Check out the Google Web Toolkit on Google development. http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Google Docs was acquired from another company, I think. There is zero possibility it’s ASP.NET now (and it’s unlikely it was originally) because there are only certain languages Google lets in the door (to simplify their server administration): Python, C++, Java.

As others have pointed out, JavaScript is primarily a client-side programming language. It’s what makes web pages interactive, so—yes, Google Docs is heavy with JavaScript on the client side and is managed by something else on the server side.

orkut is still in ASP.NET. While Google as a company is a big proponent of OpenSource, they also encourage their engineers to use whichever tools suit their needs, whether OpenSource or not. Ultimately, Google as a company woulf PREFER everything be written in one language, but to enforce this in an engineer’s 20% time would be counter-productive.

orkut.com is an example of this. It was originally written in ASP.NET and is still to a large degree ASP.NET driven, though it uses some wrappers to make it more scalable in Google’s architecture.

As for someone saying that AJAX is all about Javascript for server-side requests… while that may be true for the REQUEST (which is handled on the client-side)... the actual RESPONSE (processed on the server-side and sent back to the client) is not likely to be written in JavaScript. In other words, the JavaScript portion of AJAX is only on the client-side. There is no standard for the server-side code for AJAX processing, so it could be ASP.NET or python or any number of other server-side languages.