JavaScript In Top Industries
JavaScript (JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, or just-in-time compiled programming language with first-class functions. While it is most well-known as the scripting language for Web pages, many non-browser environments also use it, such as Node.js, Apache CouchDB, and Adobe Acrobat. JavaScript is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm, single-threaded, dynamic language, supporting object-oriented, imperative, and declarative (e.g. functional programming) styles.
Do not confuse JavaScript with the Java programming language. Both “Java” and “JavaScript” are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle in the U.S. and other countries. However, the two programming languages have very different syntax, semantic, and use.
Now, let’s discuss one of the frameworks of JavaScript, Node.js.
Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform runtime environment, written in JavaScript, the most popular programming language in the world. It is created for building fast and scalable network applications. Node.js has been a real blessing for giants like Uber and Netflix, since its launch, thanks to the numerous benefits it provides:
- Extremely comfortable to work with
- High scalability
- Executing the code on the server-side (on their computers or straight in a browser)
- Quicker development cycles
- Lightning-fast speed of processing
- Thriving open-source community
Alright, let’s now get to the list of the biggest companies that used Node.js in production and see what the reason was behind choosing it.
1. PayPal
PayPal is one of the world’s largest and the most trusted services for paying, sending money, and accepting payments. The platform allows its users to interact with each other virtually, without involving debit or credit card disclosure. For November 2017, PayPal has over 200 million active accounts.
Interestingly, Node.js was not the go-to technology for Paypal from the very start. According to @paypaleng, their initial concern was the segmented teams: those who code separately for a browser (using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript), and those who code for server applications (using Java). Thus, the boundary between the browser and the server was the primary blocker.
The solution was to use JavaScript for writing both browser and server applications, and, therefore, uniting their engineering specialties into one team.
“Like many others, we slipped Node.js in the door as a prototyping platform. Also like many others, it proved extremely proficient and we decided to give it a go on production.”
Jeff Harrel, Senior Director of Payments Products and Engineering at PayPal
Benefits of Node.js for PayPal:
- Node.js app for PayPal was built 2 times faster with fewer people working on it, as compared to the previous Java-based app
- Doubled request per second
- 35% decrease in the average response time for the same page
- 33% fewer lines of code
- 40% fewer files
2. Uber
Uber is a global transportation company, headquartered in San Francisco, CA. The company is doubling in size every 6 months, operates in 6 continents, 68 countries, 633 cities worldwide. Since its launch in 2012, Uber has become one of the most recognized alternatives to a traditional taxi. Therefore, Uber needs a platform that will keep running no matter what.
Their app connects driver-partners and riders, thus, it has to process an enormous amount of information at a fast-growing scale. Uber chose Node.js to build its massive matching system due to its ability to keep up with the pace of Uber’s huge business needs and enhanced data processing capabilities.
“Node.js is particularly well-suited to writing systems that have all their state in memory,” said Kris Kowal, Software Engineer at Uber. “They do not have to externalize the concerns of a distributed system. As a consequence, the systems can be more available, and they can respond more quickly to requests by eliminating the reading/writing and the serialization of state into a database.”
Benefits of Node.js for Uber:
- Quick and reliable processing of extreme amount of data
- Elimination of errors without the need to restart
- Quick deployment of the new code
- Strong open source community that constantly develops new solutions
3. LinkedIn
Despite the fact that many consider LinkedIn as old-fashioned and outdated, it is still the most popular business-oriented social network and a convenient tool for successful employment. LinkedIn has 467 million users from over 200 countries. In 2016 Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26 billion.
LinkedIn decided to replace their synchronous Ruby on Rails mobile app, in which clients used to make several calls for a single page, with an asynchronous event system. Therefore, they made up their mind on Node.js due to its scalability and performance efficiency. And, Node.js satisfied their expectations.
“Node.js development also encourages you to think in certain ways. Node provides an evented system with a single process which executes multiple requests. It has no concept of thread-locals forcing you to make your code stateless and modular. Although Node has added support for domains; it is mostly untested for high qps services.”
Benefits of Node.js for LinkedIn:
- 10x reduction in the number of machines for service hosting
- Servers cut from 30 to 3
- Doubled traffic capacity
- Much better performance and lowered memory overhead
- The new mobile app is up to 20x faster in some scenarios
- Front-end and back-end mobile teams combined into a single unit
- Enough headroom remains to handle 10x current levels of resource utilization
And like this, there are lots more MNCs like Netflix, eBay, Amazon, etc. using this technology to grow their business from the ground to the cloud 9.
