One can only understand the scale of the second largest online retailer ‘Walmart’ in the U.S, if they consider its 80 million monthly visitors, loads of upto 10k requests per second and 15 million items strong inventory. Now, you need to imagine the same humongous platform being migrated from its previous source onto a new React and Node.js powered platform. Yeah, it’s a large-scale task! Tough!
The migration process was initiated by the innovative tech-focused engineering division of the company known as WalmartLabs. It took the team about a year to completely migrate the rapidly scaling e-commerce platfrom, which consists of about two dozen applications. And in the process, the team didn’t lose sight of creativity and gave rise to a new React-based application platform that’s build for scalability. This platform is the underlying core of the current Walmart website.
The team is now open-sourcing this robust universal React-powered application platform, and it has been christened ‘Electrode’.
Today, we are excited to announce the open source release of Electrode, the application platform powering Walmart.com,
says Alex Grigoryan, engineer, WalmartLabs in the official medium blogpost.
Electrode can be defined as a platform which can be used to build universal React/Node.js applications with the use of modern technologies and a standardized structure. It basically provides the devs with a boilerplate code that consists of multiple modules that they can then program and add desired functionality to. The team worked on the development of the platform with some core goals to make future development and scalability easier.
The platform is easy for any developer(with knowledge of React and Node.js) to on-board and start new projects quickly to reduce the development and time to market. They can focus on building features that customers want without having to worry about the necessary packages required. The engineering team has also built-in an archetype system which the developers can follow to build and scale their apps in the future.
Now, one of the most important aspect of programming and deployement lies is code reusability, and Electrode easily allows you to seamlessly share components across projects and brands. The open-source platform also lays focus on performance and SEO and has, thus, provided developers with server side rendering(SRR) support out of the box. For further ease, the engineering team has broken down the application platform into three independent code modules — Electrode Core, Electrode Modules, and Electrode Tools.
In short, Electrode is a quality platform for building universal React/Node.js applications. It’s powering Walmart.com. And, now developers can use Electrode Platform as a whole or take its pieces, as appropriate,
says Grigoryan about the platform.
The engineering team has already migrated the complete Walmart.com website onto the new platform and is seeing a 15-20 per cent improvement in rendering, speed and overall performance. It is now parallely working on bringing Walmart’s other properties — SamsClub.com, Walmart Grocery, etc. and improving Electrode.
Future enhancements will include a deeper focus on mobile, enhancements in performance, and more — and because WalmartLabs is committed to open source, our investment is an investment for all developers who want to use Electrode.
For developer interested in trying out and building apps on the new React-powered application platform, checkout the project on Github or visit the official website right here.
