Reporting on UK-based developerFusion, Chris Alexander has uncovered some of the technologies behind Google+ to provide insight into the search giant's engine room.

Looking into the Google technology stack and development processes that went into the Google + social networking project, Alexander says that development work started out a little over a year ago as far back as the start of 2010.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Google's in-house development team used what has been dubbed a "highly agile and flexible approach" to development, during a process which no doubt saw the team "dogfooding" on the product during its development.

"On the server side, as you may expect, Google+ is all Java. It uses a lot of libraries that Google developed and open sourced over the past few years, including many that were used in Google Wave, the now-defunct real-time app that nobody really knew what to do with," reports Alexander.

"These libraries include Guice, a code cleanup tool designed to make writing Java easier; and GWT (Google Web Toolkit), another tool to ease writing Java web apps again open-sourced by Google," he added.

developerFusion goes on to report that on the client side, the HTML 5 history API has been "exploited" — an undertaking carried out to give cleaner URLs when using AJAX page navigation. Alexander comments that this is, "A pleasing alternative to the dubious at best hash-bang approach commonly adopted."

You can read the original story in full here: http://t.co/VKjHBu8