A good tool for broadening your horizons, one article teaches you to use Wappalzer to learn full stack technology

I. Introduction

Let me throw a question first. With so many related technologies and solutions on the market, if you were to design a web system, how would you choose?

As we all know, the composition of a complete high-availability and high-performance web system itself is relatively complex, in addition to the well-known front-end parts, such as static web page generators, JS libraries, UI frameworks, monitoring tools , etc., as well as Web Server , cloud services, CDN content distribution, proxy services, HTTP caching and acceleration , and more.

Some would say, I'll go with the scheme I'm most familiar with, which is the least risky.
Some people will say that I will first Google some mature solutions, and then pre-research and use the solutions with the best results.
Some people will say, I will go directly to the technical expert, he must be fine.

In fact, as long as the result is good, the final implementation is successful, and the effect is very good, then there is nothing wrong with the selection of technical solutions.

But if I tell you, I know 60% to 70% of the technology stacks of major websites on the market today, what is used for front-end frameworks, what is used for servers, what is used for back-end, what is used for CDN, etc., Would you listen to my advice first? I believe you will.

Wappalzer is such a powerful browser plug-in, it has more than 1 million users, and it is super easy to use. With just one click, you can see the technology stack used by the website you are currently visiting. Let's take a look at what technologies Segmentfault uses.

2. Discover the technology you didn’t know

Then comes the second question, if you are an experienced architect, then Wappalzer may not help you much. But if you are just a front-end engineer or a back-end engineer, now you have to take on the work of the full stack, be responsible for the part that you are not familiar with, and give technical solutions, which may be a headache. Because for front-end engineers, what does the server use? What is the backend language used for? What is the database for? What do search engines use? Do you use Amazon, Microsoft, or Alibaba and Tencent for cloud services? These series of problems are a big challenge for people who rarely touch the server. Because I have never heard of many technologies, let alone a choice?

This is where Wappalzer comes in handy, you just need to keep opening various websites, look at the list of technologies it gives you, and you will quickly learn some technologies you are not familiar with.

Next we test the test to see if it really works.

First open Github to see some of the technologies they use

OK, from the list of technologies it gives, there are three technologies I don't know about: lit-html , Amazon S3 , and Turbo , so we just need to click in and take a look. Taking Turbo as an example, after clicking in, Wappalyzer briefly introduced what Turbo does, and gave the official website link. I learned that it is a JS framework for quickly building web applications. So is this unheard of technology very unpopular? Scrolling down, it also lists the top 10 most visited websites using the technology.

Let's take a look at what is Amazon S3 ?

It's Amazon's object storage service, so let's see which sites use it. As you can see, it is used by very famous websites, including linkedin, figma, notion, spotify and so on. Suffice it to say that Amazon's object storage is a very reliable service, and it's no problem to choose it.

Well, above, we used Github as an example to briefly introduce the use of Wappalzer . You may find that there are not many technologies listed, which are actually inseparable from the website you visit, and some technologies are difficult to detect.

3. Horizontal comparison of technologies used in the same field

The third question, when I learn about some technology that I don't know, can I directly adopt this technology? No, the implementation of a technology must be closely related to the entire ecological chain and the overall technical architecture of the project. So we can't single-handedly decide whether we can adopt this technology. One of the best ways is that we can analyze the same type of website to see if they use the same or different technology for a single function, so that we can analyze and choose the technology.

Next, let's take StackoverFlow and Segmentfault as examples, both of which are question-and-answer technology websites with a large number of users, so let's compare the technologies they use.

Segmentfault

StackoverFlow

From the list of technologies in the above two figures, the same technologies are Google Analytics, Webpack, Highlight.js, Google Tag Manager . Let's not talk about the front-end technology, let's see what this Google Tag Manager is. It is a Tag Management System (TMS) that allows quick and easy updating of measurement codes and related code snippets as tags on your website or mobile application.

Let's see which sites use it

Then after a horizontal comparison, we now know that blog systems, recruitment websites, and question-and-answer systems are all using this technology. If your system also has a similar tagging function, you can use Google Tag Manager with confidence.

4. Is this technology really outdated?

The fourth question, we all know that after the front-end engineering, with the continuous emergence of various front-end frameworks, the jQuery technology has obviously been excluded and smeared, and many people even look down on the front-end using jQuery, thinking that this is a low performance . As a front-end engineer who uses jQuery a lot, I want to refute but don't know how. At this point Wappalzer became my best helper, and we just had to go to the most famous sites and see if they were still using jQuery.

We have seen before that Github and StackoverFlow are still using jQuery, so let's click in and see which other sites are using it.

It can be seen that Wordpress, codeopen, gitlab, CSDN and other websites are using it. Whether it is a legacy reason or a real need, it proves that jQuery is not outdated. Its positioning is different from that of modern front-end frameworks and should not be unfairly judged.

5. Find Alternatives

Wappalzer also has a powerful function, which is to list the most popular alternative technologies this year. Take the Google Tag Manager just now as an example to see what its alternatives are.

When we click on an alternative, a comparison of the two technologies will be listed

6. More functions

Wappalzer has a lot of other features, including telling you where the technology is used the most. There is even a charging function to find out more technical details. I hope everyone can make good use of this tool and open up their horizons.