Search posts, tags, users, and pages
What made PayPal engineers switch to Node.js? In other words what problems did you guys face with Java stack which was eventually solved with Node.js?
Hi Dylan, I was part of the team that started the Node @ PayPal transformation. I arrived towards the end of the prototyping stage, so I was heavily involved in the evangelism and educational aspects of the transformation.
Long story short, there's nothing inherently wrong with Java (other than being verbose :) ), however, we had painted ourselves into a corner by building very cumbersome and inflexible frameworks on top of Java.
The front-end development cycle was very slow because of it, so we saw Node as a way to hit the reset button, and start fresh with a framework that would incorporate all the lessons learned from the Java days. (Mostly, what not to do with a framework)
This resulted in the rebirth of our open source program, starting with http://krakenjs.com, our nodeJS framework,
Here's a more in-depth look at the history of our change that I presented at jQuery Conf a couple of years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJVk6KiOEBA
All that said, we still do plenty of work in Java, mostly for midtier / backend services. Our newer frameworks use Spring3/Java8, and are much easier to use than those in the past.
Hey Dylan, Thanks for your question. I used to be a part of the core node.js team as well in the past.
To reiterate on what Lenny said
We wanted to move away from building heavy in-house infrastructure around web app development and try out newer technologies. Earlier Java was used heavily in web-tier. Today, Node.js predominately dominates the web-tier. While we have small mid-tier orchestration services in node.js, Java is still used predominantly in the mid-tier.
With node.js we have been able to extend expertise of our webdevs to full stack from just being on the client side.
Node.js also enabled us to experiment to much more savvier front end and native technologies.
NPM ecosystem was a big win to enable tearing down silos within teams and share work across :))
Here is a talk I gave at Intuit as part of Kraken team which focusses on our decision to move to node :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNtY5ObDJ8c So far it has been a big win...