What is Shopify?
First thing first, what is Shopify? Well, Shopify Inc. is a Canadian multinational e-commerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario. Established over ten years ago by Tobi, the initial objective was to sell snowboards with his company under the name Snowdevil. However, he soon learned that it was very challenging to sell snowboards online without a user-friendly eCommerce platform. Hence, he managed to build up a platform, and that is how he created Shopify.
What programming language is Shopify built on?
Liquid is an open-source template language created by Shopify and written in Ruby. It is the backbone of Shopify themes and is used to load dynamic content on storefronts. Liquid has been in production use at Shopify since 2006 and is now used by many other hosted web applications.
The Development Phase
Three developers created Shopify, and it only took two months for them to do that, which is very impressive. Shopify released its iOS app that enabled the store owners to run their stores from their iPhone and iPad in 2010. Shopify introduced its Shopify Payments that allowed the retailers to accept credit cards without integrating any third-party gateway in August 2013.
It also launched the point of sale system using iPad. By doing that, merchants can utilize an iPad to accept credit and debit card offline. In December 2016, they released the Frenzy app to grow flash sales and increasing product sales by triggering demand. One year after, Shopify confirmed cooperating with Amazon to help merchants to sell their products on Amazon from their Shopify stores. Not only that, they became business partners with Deliv for same-day delivery.
The Programming language Stack
Ruby on Rails – Tobu Lutke is the main Shopify developer. As mentioned above, with the company name being Snowdevil, he used to sell snowboards online. Nevertheless, he was unable to find a platform as he expected. He was one of the core Ruby on Rails developers in the Ruby organization at that time. Hence, he selected Ruby on Rails as a programming language for the platform. But he did not use only Ruby on Rails as programming language. The use of Liquid templating language implies that.
Why he picked Ruby on Rails is the convenience and tailor-made characteristics it brought about to develop the Shopify platform. Besides, Tobu realized that in the future, there should be more scalability since he was positive about his brand’s potential. Nowadays, Ruby is among the most popular scalable programming languages.
JavaScript
They uncovered that the Admin panel that store owners see was written in a proprietary JavaScript platform and that they recreated the Shopify Admin panel entirely in Ruby on Rails after removing nearly 30,000 lines of JavaScript code. Also, there is no doubt that for almost every online development, JavaScript is a must-have. Tobu was particularly fond of JavaScript and he revealed that in the 2017 Developer Conference. They have brought up ReactJS many times.
MySQL
You need to see the software company’s careers page to figure out the programming languages they are currently using. The developers in the technologies and programming languages they are using for their products are the crucial staff. Shopify’s Careers Page shows the requirements for MySQL developers. Hence, it is safe to conclude that MySQL is the main database behind Shopify.
PHP
The front end language is Liquid which is almost PHP-based; therefore, we can, as well, prove the use of MySQL as PHP-MySQL combination - the best combination. Similar syntaxes could, indeed, make it so much easier for PHP developers to make a transition to Shopify.
TechStack
If you want to figure out an online platform’s tech-stack, then a useful website, you should take into consideration is TechStack.io. If the platform is Shopify, it would show Go, Docker, and Nginx. Go is the buzzing programming language right now. Its robust features that are perfectly suitable for Shopify. Also, the fact that Docker is an open platform for running distributed applications is a partial explanation for Shopify’s use of Docker. Nginx is a more speedy and accurate proxy server accessible and improves Shopify’s speed.
Liquid template language (the backbone of every Shopify themes)
Developed by Shopify and written in Ruby, Liquid is an open-source template language. Used as a way to load dynamic content on storefronts, it is, indeed, the foundation of Shopify themes. Liquid has taken effect since 2006 and has gained popular use by many other hosted web applications.
As a store owner, the knowledge Liquid would enable you to apprehend your theme better. It does not matter if you are not a developer or a coder/engineer, you could still address the unexpected issues yourself or realize the stems of these problems. It is, indeed, time and money saver.