After reading I Thought ColdFusion was Dead? i thought "what a good idea!". So i started looking into ways to find out if a site use ColdFusion or nor. Started with NetCraft but it didn't help much. So i went other way.

First of all i had to get the list of sites from GotCFM. Thought to ask the owner for the list in excel format, but figured faster will be just to write a parser that will grab all the info. After all in ColdFusion that's a piece of cake.

The second step was for each of the sites to find out it's Alexa rank. This was more complicated. The guys that make the code are pretty smart asses. So, in order other smart asses like me to not "stole" programmatically site's ranks directly from the html source, they randomly insert different numbers in the numbers representing the rank of the site. So, for example, "12,367" easily can become "182,673467", etc. When looking at the page in browser all is fine, but not in the source. It's because for the unneeded numbers they add randomly classes defined as "display: none". Nice huh? This way that numbers are hidden in the browser but not in the source.
After i figured this out, the rest was easy:
1) found the right css
2) load it into a variable
3) when parsing, check if the class exists in that css and if yes, just skip that numbers
4) etc etc etc

This way, "hacking" Alexa wasn't much harder than any other html source.

The conclusion of the story?
For each smart ass, there is a smarter one. Especially if the last one know ColdFusion

Ah! After i did the code, i thought i will run it as it is and then will change it a bit it to run in threads.
Said and done. The results was pretty impressive. If in normal mode it took about 29 minutes to run the script, using the threads the time went down for almost 3 times and took only 10.5 minutes.

Ok. Back to our sheeps.
Here are some stats.

Total number of sites: 902
Alexa ranked sites: 664

Top 10 sites for each engine:

BlueDragon Server (Free Edition) 409670 http://www.omg-music.com 439264 http://www.theonering.com 629078 http://www.haris.at 801729 http://www.usefulconcept.com 2999534 http://www.aquariusage.com 3328962 http://www.thestonetable.com 4387208 http://www.cfhunt.com 7714250 http://www.redwhiteandesoteric.com	BlueDragon Server for .Net 6 http://www.myspace.com 9803 http://www.ebags.com 79305 http://www.6pm.com 102236 http://maps.grida.no 490031 http://www.pma.com BlueDragon Server for J2EE 15551 http://www.blog-city.com/
BlueDragon Server JX 148496 http://www.viviotech.net/ 831278 http://www.faucets4cheap.com 1659298 http://www.aftershockweb.com/ 1675794 http://www.gotcfm.com/ 1853637 http://whitehorsemedia.com 2534262 http://www.aftershockwebhosting.com/ 4605940 http://www.iambright.com	ColdFusion 4.x 1002085 http://www.hopkinschildrens.org/
ColdFusion 5.x 3751 http://www.economist.com 7710 http://www.she.com/home 36735 http://www.parliament.uk/ 43433 http://www.yogajournal.com/ 63531 http://hcec.halomaps.org/ http://h2v.halomaps.org http://www.halomaps.org http://forum.halomaps.org 127451 http://www.ausaid.gov.au/ 317021 http://www.aeroplanner.com 379558 http://www.cordonbleu.edu 386212 http://www.boeingstore.com 409940 http://www.foodstandards.gov.au/npc/index.cfm?fuseaction=DisplayDefault
ColdFusion MX 6.x 5715 http://www.scotsman.com/ 5928 http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/s/cder/drugsatfda/index.cfm 6812 http://portal.acm.org/portal.cfm 8212 http://www.ediets.com 12618 http://www.nationalexpress.com/home/hp.cfm 15834 http://www.uva.nl 30427 http://www.sofitel.com/sofitel/gb/na/index.shtml 35147 http://www.wmata.com/ 39151 http://www.vu.nl 43765 http://www.wilton.com
ColdFusion MX 7.x 20 http://investor.ebay.com/releases.cfm 78 http://www.adobe.com http://kuler.adobe.com http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/knowhow/ 165 http://h30143.www3.hp.com/enter.cfm?oid=64929 362 http://www.niehs.nih.gov/ http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/ 513 http://ros.reuters.com 837 http://www.fedex.com/us/investorrelations/ 846 http://www.research.att.com/projects.cfm 875 http://lsda.jsc.nasa.gov 1404 http://ir.homedepot.com/releases.cfm 1494 https://www.bankofamerica.com/index.cfm	ColdFusion 8 72630 http://www.riaforge.org Ralio 228043 http://www.livegigs.de 462043 http://www.amtrakcalifornia.com/rail 950133 http://www.streetteam.de 966573 http://www.zinodavidoff.com 2907761 http://www.ics.li
Unknown CFML Server 362 http://www.nimh.nih.gov/ 875 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm 1247 http://rr.com 1254 http://www.dtsc.ca.gov/ 2276 http://www.voanews.com/ 3751 http://www.economist.com/ 5511 http://www.leg.state.fl.us/ 7354 http://www.autobytel.com 8321 http://www.sciam.com/ 9841 http://www.tek-tips.com/

Having all this said, i would like to ask anyone that know a site that should be here and is not, to let me know about it with details about the engine (if possible). Also here are not present some of the engines at all, so if anyone have any info about that kind of sites, i will appreciate to know about them too.
Also i am going next days to work on an application that will do such a research weekly. So we will see the information in dynamics.

Hmmm i think there was something else i wanted to talk about, but it's 3:30am here so i can't remember what was that.

Hope this info will be of interest.



Correction (08/03/2007): http://www.wmata.com/ seem to be using CFMX 6 instead of CF3.