How do I determine what a website is built with if they rewrite their urls?

Question

If a website rewrites their urls, what is the best way to figure out what technology/technologies they are using under the covers?

Answer 1

Hi,

You should take a look at the answer I gave to this question : IS there anyway to tell if a website is coded in PHP or ASP

(I won't copy-paste it here -- would probably be pointless -- but I think it was not a bad answer ^^ )

To make it short and only give one example : you could take a look at the HTTP-headers that the server is sending alongside its response to your query : often, those can provide you with a lot of interesting informations ;-)

For instance, on wikipedia, you'd get something like this :

Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.4-2ubuntu5wm1

So... I'd say wikipedia is using PHP ;-)

Answer 2

Looking at the source.

Watching all traffic from the page (including AJAX) with a tool like fiddler as those URLs may not be rewritten, and the headers contain valuable information.

.NET pages will most likely contain a control named __VIEWSTATE and it names it's controls in a fairly standard manner, assuming steps haven't been taken to change it. There will likely also be a js method named __doPostBack on the page.