Javascript use cases

Netflix

Over time, Netflix moved away from its more traditional structure into the cloud and started to introduce NodeJS. With Node, Netflix was able to break down pieces of their user interface into individual services. This more distributed approach was able to speed things up and alleviate stress on their servers. Today, a large portion of Netflix’s interface is running on Node.

Walmart

Most people probably don’t think of Walmart as a tech company, but because they’re one of the largest retailers in the world, their online retail business is gigantic. It’s not much of a stretch to see how they need to build a technologically advanced web application to drive their online business. Walmart started with Java. It’s a solid enterprise-grade platform that has been the de facto choice for years. However, Walmart needed something faster and lighter weight for their mobile site. So, they turned to NodeJS.Once again, Walmart began to see Node as a valid Java replacement in loads of other places. Today, the Walmart.com that you see is powered by Node. NodeJS was also the ideal choice for other web applications within their marketplace that require multiple users to simultaneously access management interfaces.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn relies on NodeJS for its mobile site. A few years back, LinkedIn used Rails for its mobile site. As with other large Rails applications, it was slow, monolithic, and it scaled poorly. LinkedIn switched over to NodeJS to solve its scaling problems. Node’s asynchronous capabilities allowed the LinkedIn mobile site to perform more quickly than before while using fewer resources. Node also made data sharing and building APIs easier for LinkedIn developers.

PayPal

PayPal has obviously been using JavaScript on the front end of their website for a long time, but that’s only the beginning. The online payment giant was one of the earliest adopters of NodeJS. During an overhaul of their account overview page, they decided to try building the page in Node at the same time as their usual Java development. The NodeJS version worked out so well, that they chose to use it in production and build all client-facing applications in Node going forward. That means that most of what you see in your account is running on Node. PayPal even went as far as to create and maintain their own version of Express, called Kraken. They like JavaScript over at PayPal.

Microsoft

Okay, so you’re probably not going to find JavaScript powering Windows anytime soon, but Microsoft relies on JavaScript for a whole lot else. First off, Microsoft needs to work closely with JavaScript to built its Edge web browser. All browsers need to process and execute JavaScript efficiently, so Microsoft has developed and maintains its own JavaScript engine for Edge. Actually, there has been talking of them creating an alternate version of NodeJS with the Edge engine. Recently, Microsoft has really embraced NodeJS. They thoroughly support Node on the Azure cloud platform. It's one of Azure’s major features, and they’ve integrated Visual Studio support for Node. Microsoft has also developed a version of Node for Internet Of Things(IoT) applications. NodeJS is great for IoT because it’s lightweight and efficient.

JavaScript Is Everywhere!

These are only 5 examples, but you can certainly find more. So much of the web runs on JavaScript, it’d be much harder to find a company that doesn’t use JavaScript in some way. These companies are among the largest tech companies in the world. Many are also running the largest production deployments of NodeJS. The others are responsible for important parts of the JavaScript ecosystem as a whole.