If you plan to build an application expecting to process huge amounts of data, Node.js will soon become your best friend. It’s an excellent framework for the development of server-side applications using JavaScript. Yes, framework. Nodel.js is not a programming language but an open-source, cross-platform framework based on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript runtime engine. Node.js converts JavaScript code into low-level machine code and is included in the tech stack of some of the most famous worldwide apps.
Find out which of the most well-known, global companies use Node.js in their applications and learn why they chose this specific technology.
Why did PayPal, the largest worldwide system for online payments decide on Node.js? As known, the company supports international transactions in more than 100 currencies and it’s generally seen as one of the most trustworthy.
Before it became popular, the application was not developed in an efficient manner. Development teams were divided into those who coded for the browser in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, and server-side developers who coded in JAVA. Due to this division, the application developed more slowly and did not achieve the level of performance it could.
[…] the primary blocker at PayPal has always been the artificial boundary we established between the browser and server – said Jeff Harrell, director of Engineer at Paypal
Thanks to Node.js, both the browser and server applications could be written in JavaScript. It unified PayPal’s engineering specialties into one team and provided the needed speed of development. Here are the results obtained when building the PayPal application using Node.js. The app was:
What’s more, the company doubled the number of requests served per second, at the same time decreasing the average response time by 35%!
Netflix is the world’s leading subscription-based streaming service that allows members to watch TV shows and movies without commercials on an internet-connected device. It is currently present in over 190 countries and has about 130 million memberships.
Netflix chose Node because they wanted to achieve a lightweight, modular, and fast application. Thanks to Node, which builds the company’s server-side rendering, the startup time of the application was reduced by 70%. In fact, the solution turned out to be efficient to the extent the company’s now moving data access layers to Node.js runtime as well.
According to Yunong Xiao, Principal Software Engineer at Netflix, there are three main reasons why they decided to include Node.js in the tech stack:
LinkedIn is a social network that focuses on professional networking and career development. It allows users to create their professional profiles, document their experience, find career opportunities, and build a network of contacts.
Currently, Node.js is the foundation of LinkedIn’s mobile software stack.
Here’s why they chose it according to Kiran Prasad, VP of Product at LinkedIn:
One reason was scale. The second is, if you look at Node, the thing it’s best at doing is talking to other services. The mobile app has to talk to our platform API and database. We’re not doing massive data analytics. Node showed us huge performance gains compared to what we were using before, which was Ruby on Rails.
Choosing to base the platform on Node.js resulted in several major benefits for the company:
Twitter is an online news and social networking site where people communicate in short messages – tweets. As of the second quarter of 2021, Twitter had 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide.
The company used Node.js during the development of Twitter Lite in 2017. It was a complete rewrite of the mobile website optimized for interface speed and network efficiency. The app is designed to load quickly even on slower Internet connections and is optimized for a 30% faster launch time.
“We’re using that as sort of a way to compete in markets where native apps are less able to compete, where people don’t want to download a 200-megabyte iOS app. They want something that fits under 600 kilobytes.” said James Bellenger, Senior Software Engineer at Twitter Inc.
If you’re reading this article you probably wonder if Node.js is a good fit for your app’s tech stack. As you can see, the framework meets the expectations of some of the most famous apps in the worldwide market, including the most demanding infrastructures handling huge amounts of data every day. Will it be a good choice for your product? Let’s find out! Contact our team and our backend specialists will help you define the tech stack for your app!
