Role of JAVASCRIPT in e-Bay - Use case of JS in MNC's

WHAT IS JAVASCRIPT?

JavaScript is one of the numerous programming languages used primarily for the web (certain JS frameworks help with native mobile development). Thanks to JS, the websites you visit have more action going than just displaying static information to look at. For example, this includes real-time content updates, interactive maps, graphics, and videos. Among the standard web technologies, there are three: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

eBay’s story is a lot like Netflix’s. For a long time, just about everything in eBay’s tech stack was based on Java. A few years ago, eBay encountered a problem that Java wasn’t the right solution for. They decided to give NodeJS a shot instead.

Node worked so well that eBay not only kept using it for that particular service, they began migrating their entire user-facing stack to NodeJS. Now, just about everything that you interact with on eBay is powered by Node. Sure, beneath Node, Java is still dealing with their databases, but eBay still places a lot of trust in NodeJS.

In running one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, eBay has tackled technical challenges at a scale that few others have. Several open-source technologies have made a critical difference within our technology stack, including?Hadoop?and?Kylin, a distinguished open-source tool that is?now a Top-Level-Project at the Apache Software Foundation. Node.js easily qualifies as one of the primary open-source tools that eBay leverages.?

If you are unfamiliar with Node.js, it is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment for developing server-side Web applications, built on?Chrome's V8 JavaScript Engine.

How pervasive is Node.js at eBay??Node.js has become eBay’s de facto front-end web stack that powers many of our major web flows. “The modern web ecosystem is built around Node.js and we get numerous benefits from it,” said eBay Engineer Senthil Padmanabhan. “Development tools, testing and automation libraries, and many other useful components are all distributed as Node.js modules. JavaScript is the preferred language choice for many web developers, so eBay developers intuitively work with Node.js. Also, they get reusability benefits with Node.js, like sharing and distributing common components is very easy with it.”

In addition, eBay’s platform team has built some incredible tools to successfully build and deploy Node.js applications to production. It also allows application team members to benefit from very efficient monitoring, allowing them to respond to any issues that arise in real-time.