Kayak Technology

If you are a nerd, you might be wondering what Kayak is made of. The short version: it's regular web pages served up by Apache, Tomcat, Java, with Perl operational glue, all running on Linux and developed (mostly) on Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux. We use MySQL when we need to do databasy things. We use memcached to keep the database from getting crushed.

If you're not crying from boredom yet, read on for further details.

Java isn't the greatest programming language in the world. It's probably not even in the top ten. But there are a ton of great, free, widely tested libraries to do everything under the sun, and it is quite efficient. And it is well-supported by developer tools on all computing platforms.

Perl, of course, is the great do-everything of scripting languages. It is not exactly elegant, but it is supremely powerful in qualified hands.

MySQL is a modern, easy-to-use and free or very inexpensive (depending on how you use it) relational database. It is very reliable, and very fast. I'm not saying that you should take your gigantic multi-site global banking system and port it to use MySQL, but for maintaining data about all the hotels in the world, it's just fine.

memcached is a distributed memory cache. It works for many languages, but we use it for Java. It is a magic bullet that lets you scale up massively without buying massive, expensive, complex database hardware. I can't believe this stuff wasn't built in on so-called "network" operating systems years ago.

We run the Kayak web site on Linux because it is free and it works.

Cheers,

billo, Ultra Vice President of Code

P.S., if you want to send me encouraging notes or vitriolic hate mail, I'll bet a clever person like you could guess my email address.