Ebay

Starts in 1995, initial name AuctionWeb (V1) :
- very simple architecture
- based on perl
- no database, for data persistence they used plain files

Because of rapid growth they needed to improve their architecture and so V2 (clever name) was born:
- replaced perl with C/C++
- started using a database in a master-slave configuration
- C++ back-end
- XSLT front-end
Any request will lead to an XML file being created in C++ and the XLST processor will transform that into html.
*pretty sophisticated architecture for the 90s, XLST was cutting-edge back then*

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