Hey,
Is there a way to even tell if a site is implemented in Rails/Ruby. You know .JSP (Java Server Pages), ...
Jason
There's no way to know for sure, but the urls are going to be your biggest giveaway. If you see something/that/looks/like/this/in/the/url it's probably rails. Or, if you see: blah.com/articles/show/345 it's probably rails.
Is there a way to even tell if a site is implemented in Rails/Ruby. You know .JSP (Java Server Pages), ...
Well, you could hit it with curl and see if "Mongrel" comes back anywhere in the headers... good chance if it does, it's Rails... not a gaurantee though.
-philip
Hard to tell if it's a Rails site. There are few artifacts of the underlying bare metal cluttering up the URLs. That's a good thing. One thing you might try is running the "Web 2.0" validator on a site. It's far from perfect (gets one out of 4 of my Rails sites correct) but it's a start.
Another thing to look for is the inclusion of the prototype JavaScript libraries. They are certainly not constrained to Rails but they are so easy to use in Rails that many if not most Rails apps do include them.
A final thing to try is to find out the server software. If it's Mongrel, it's probably Rails. If it's lighttpd, there's some chance that it's Rails. If it's Apache, there's a chance but lower than if it's lighttpd (that's just what I think), and if it's IIS, it's possible but unlikely that it's Rails.
Hope this is of use to you.
Jason Vogel-2 wrote:
Is there a way to even tell if a site is implemented in Rails/Ruby. You know .JSP (Java Server Pages), ...
Heh, I can't believe I forgot the easiest method... Check to see if
http://domain.com/images/rails.png
exists 
I know it does on our site simply because we've never removed it.
What I always do is check the image/stylesheet/javascript urls. Not only will they probably be in the default Rails directories, they'll be timestamped.
Philip's idea is better, though.
- Nathan
Jason Vogel wrote:
Is there a way to even tell if a site is implemented in Rails/Ruby. You know .JSP (Java Server Pages), ...
They typically use a wide Ariel or Helvetica font, big blocks of pastel colors, and as few as possible border lines, grooves, or bevels.
Jason Vogel wrote:
Is there a way to even tell if a site is implemented in Rails/Ruby.
If you run the site with Internet Explorer and "Debug JavaScript Exceptions" turned on, and you get a message box for each page on the site...
Rails error messages are mostly fine, but still just a tiny little bit off so that they are recognizable.
Umm... You can customize the hell out of error reporting with CSS alone. I would hardly call this an accurate method for determining the application language.
-M