JavaScript Is Eating The World

Incase you haven't heard the news, JavaScript and NodeJS are single handedly eating the world of software. NodeJS is an Open Source server-side JavaScript environment based on the V8 JS engine found in Google Chrome. Once only thought of as "hipster" technology, NodeJS is quickly becoming one of the most commonly used environments for building web applications and is beginning to find its way into the Enterprise.

Below is a list of 5 huge companies who have adopted the popular "hipster" server-side JavaScript engine for use inside high traffic, high profile production projects.

#1 NETFLIX

Nexflix used JavaScript and NodeJS to transform their website into a single page application. Traditionally, Netflix has been an enterprise Java shop, but “as we migrated out of the data center to the cloud we moved to a more service-based architecture,” Trott said. The company is in the process of breaking up what used to be a monolithic Java application into a set of smaller services. Java still powers the backend of Netflix, but all the stuff that the user sees comes from Node. In addition to Node, Netflix is also using ReactJS in their stack.

#2 PAYPAL

PayPal too is moving away from Java and onto JavaScript and NodeJS for use in their web application platform. PayPal began using NodeJS as a prototyping platform and when it proved extremely proficient and they decided try it out in production. Â PayPal's first usage of NodeJS in production wasn’t a minor application; it was their account overview page which is one of the apps most trafficked features. As insurance, the PayPal team simultaneously developed the same "account overview" rebuild using Java and the results proved their hypothesis proved that the JavaScript team was able to build the product both faster and more efficiently. Since this transformation PayPal has since released an Open Source extension for ExpressJS called KrakenJS which can add an extra layer of security and scalability to your NodeJS Server.

#3 UBER

Uber has built its massive driver / rider matching system on Node.js Distributed Web Architecture. Check out the keynote from Uber's Tom Crouche at the Node.js Interactive Conference below. Tom is a senior site reliability engineer and talks about how Node.js is being used at Uber and how future growth requires the community to push the boundaries and expectations for Node.js. Uber’s GitHub page is a good source to also learn more about the company’s most critical systems.

#4 IBM

IBM has also embraced NodeJS as well. Myles Borins from IBM spoke about his experiences during this past NodeJS Interactive conference. Here is what he had to say: "During October of 2015 I was given the task of working on The Canary in the Gold Mine, a smoke testing utility that automates running unit tests of various various modules in the node.js ecosystem. CITGM has been incredibly successful, finding all sorts of regressions across the ecosystem and in node core itself.

#5 MICROSOFT

Even Microsoft has embraced NodeJS, offering direct integrations into their Azure Platform, releasing a wealth of tutorials targeted at Node and they have even announced plans to fork the project and build their own version of Node powered by their Edge Javascript engine instead of Chrome's V8.

Comments

[J Olivera]

nodejs/javascript/typescript is actually the web development future.

imo serious software development will always use compiled langs. (computer os, hardware demanding software, videogames, native layers of hardware controlling) and maybe this changes if rams gets cheaper and faster (in the future ofc) but people should be interested on making current languages better than migrating from one to another.

[Narendra Singh]

I could not understand this, what Jeff Atwood and others, if any are trying to make a point with this statement.
Can any one explain me ?

[Divyesh Parmar]

Java still powers the backend of Netflix, but all the stuff that the user sees comes from Node

Can you or someone please explain how is that possible to have 2 backend technologies working together. I'm sorry for stupid question I've just started creating simple web apps like blog and weather apps with node.js express.js now.

I also know Java but never know how it works on backend.

[Kelvin Wangonya]

I needed this today. Thanks :)

[Dmytro Pylypenko]

Don't forget about IBM investment in Swift as server-side language.

[jD91mZM2]

Ok I wanna die now

[Nijeesh Joshy]

I Love Js

[Manuel Abarca]

One language to rule them all xD

[István Lantos]

Node.js is popular, because almost all build/automation tools that we use written in Javascript.

Node.js is popular, because almost all of use start to thinkering with JS first, then go to more well-respected languages like Go, Python, Ruby, C#, Java, PHP, etc.

One day, most of use ditch Javascript when we get to know the other languages...

[Aaron Powell]

Minor correction, Microsoft did fork Node.js to run on Chakra and contributed it back, the release is called Node-ChakraCore and can be downloaded from GitHub or Node.js's website. But it's not a fork like io.js was, it's a fork to enable a different runtime and address how to handle C++ node modules via NAPI.