How to discover architectures\techologies used by a non open source software

Posted by systempuntoout on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by systempuntoout
Published on 2010-04-25T12:09:22Z Indexed on 2010/04/25 12:13 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 241

Filed under:

reverse-engineering

|

architecture

|

software

|

software-engineering

Sometimes i would like to know how a cool software is made or the brilliant architecture behind an hot web service; but the software is not open-source and the web service have no public documentation.

Do you have any techniques to discover some hints on how a software is made?

Is it possible to do it?

Do you know some site that publish architectures\technologies used by softwares\web service?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about reverse-engineering

Reverse engineering and patching a DirectX game?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Background I am playing Imperishable Night, one of the Touhou series of games. The shoot button is 'z', moving slower is 'shift', and the arrow keys move. Unfortunately for me, using shift-z ghosts my right arrow key, so I can't move to the right while shooting. This ghosting happens in all applications… >>> More
Reverse Engineering Custom Data File

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
At my place of work we have a legacy document management system that is now unsupported by the developers due to variours reasons, i have been asked to look into extracting the documents contained in this system to eventually be imported into a new 3rd party system. From various tracing and process… >>> More
Reverse engineering to get answers

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
So I've spent the last few days looking for a way to create a simple image drawing app with wxPython, and I think the key to doing just that is understanding how to use Device Contexts. The problem is that the wxPython demo program doesn't demonstrate DCs, and the docs for both wxPython and wxWidgets… >>> More
reverse engineering c programs

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
every c program is converted to machine code, if this binary is distributed. Since the instruction set of a computer is well known, is it possible to get back the C original program? >>> More
Reverse Engineering a Server Side Trace

as seen on SQL Server Central - Search for 'SQL Server Central'
How to reverse engineer or script a trace for disaster recovery, or simply scripting for enhance and adjustment. >>> More

Related posts about architecture

3-tier architecture v. 3-server architecture

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm building a traditional .NET MVC site, so I've got a natural 3-tier software architecture setup (presentation in the form of Views, business layer in the controller, and data layer in the models and data access layer). When I've deployed such sites, it usually goes either on one server (where… >>> More
"cloud architecture" concepts in a system architecture diagrams

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
If you design a distributed application for easy scale-out, or you just want to make use of any of the new “cloud computing” offerings by Amazon, Google or Microsoft, there are some typical concepts or components you usually end up using: distributed blob storage (aka S3) asynchronous, durable message… >>> More
Is the PowerPC (G4) architecture better than Intel x86 architecture for certain types of application

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I have a PowerMac G4 from around the year 2000. It's a serviceable Unix machine but I don't do much with it since I have plenty of Pentium 4 machines around with Linux on them. I was wondering if the PowerPC based machine is capable of handling certain tasks faster or "better" than Intel based machines… >>> More
SAAS architecture and salesforce database architecture

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Hello all, I am architecting a software project and I want to create a SAAS (Software As a service) one. I want to model my application along the lines of Salesforce. I really like there customization features but I am not sure how they really go about it. I read that they create an ID for every… >>> More
Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
@font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph… >>> More