Detecting a website's framework

Question

I was reading the article "50 of the Best Websites Developed Using Ruby on Rails". It seems quite impressive.

But is there any way to find out which framework any specific website uses? Say dzone.com, how could I find out which framework it is using?

How could I find websites made with, for example, the Spring Framework?

Answer 1

BuiltWith can help, when you want to know which languages/frameworks/... are used by a website.

I suppose it goes though HTTP headers, and stuff like that, to extract as many informations as possible.

For instance, if you go to http://www.dzone.com/links/index.html and take a look at the HTTP headers the server sends, you'll see this one :

Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) DAV/2 SVN/1.5.5 Resin/4.0.4 PHP/5.2.8

Which indicates the website is served by an Apache server, that supports PHP 5.2.8 -- so chances are the website is developped in PHP.
(Of course, as the server can send whatever it wants in this header, it could just be a trap ^^ )

Answer 2

You could always try emailing the webmaster. Just be complimentary and try not to sound like you want to make a cheap knock-off of his/her site.

Answer 3

http://guess.scritch.org does pretty well for alot of CMS's, frameworks and platforms.