Writely, the online word processor acquired by Google, has gone public after a long time as being an invitation-only service following its acquisition by Google.

When it went invite-only, Huw managed to get his hands on an invite, so any Gizbuzz readers lucky enough to have commented on the post there would have been able to use it before today.

Its opening up to the world again presumably means that it’s finished its transition to Google servers. The interesting thing here is something that Raju Vegesna pointed out in the first Gizbuzz Podcast. Writely is based on Microsoft’s ASP.NET server-side technology (that is currently Windows-only), and Google traditionally host their stuff on Linux-based servers (and often use Python as their programming language). So if Writely has made the transition to Google servers, are those servers running Windows Server?

A point I made in the podcast was that I heard that Google were planning to get the .NET code to run on Linux using Mono. Mono, for those of you who don’t know, is an open source implementation of the .NET specification (and languages like C#) which works on Linux. So far, it’s only really been used on a few desktop apps for Linux (Beagle search is a good example), and it hasn’t made it big time onto running .NET web applications on Linux/Apache.

So has Google used Mono on the new Writely installation? Interestingly enough, it’s not clear. On most Google pages, they use a web server known only as GWS (Google Web Server?). From what non-Googlers can guess, it’s a slightly modified version of Apache, the de facto web server for the majority of sites (guess what server Gizbuzz uses!).

But as we know, Apache can’t serve ASP.NET pages at the moment, at least not using Microsoft’s tools. So when I loaded up Wireshark, a program which allows me to watch the raw communication between me and the net, I was shocked to discover that writely.com registers as running GWS; supposedly, Google’s Apache.

So this must mean that either Google are using Microsoft’s IIS and just spoofing the world, or they are running a Mono-driven customised Apache. Of course, there’s no confirmation of this, but if they have managed to do it, why hasn’t it been done elsewhere?

And on a completely unrelated note, I will be away for a few days sans internet access (and Huw is away and unplugged as well), so there won’t be any posts for a few days. Don’t worry though, we haven’t given up and I should be posting again by Wednesday.

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