r/javascript • u/endpointben • Aug 11 '15

Netflix.com Adopts Universal JavaScript, Drops Java From Rendering Pipeline

http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/08/netflix-universal-javascript
482 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

115 comments sorted by

View all comments

25

u/freebit Aug 11 '15

I think the biggest news here is the dropping of Java in a company that was plum full of Java developers.

7

u/dsk Aug 11 '15 edited Aug 11 '15

Did they actually drop it or did they drop it from rendering HTML but kept the service APIs Java-based? Because if they did the former, that would be idiotic. The latter makes a ton of sense.

2

u/novagenesis Aug 11 '15

Can I ask why? Our APIs are all in node.js right now and they have scaled fantastically.

Is it just "it wasn't broken, we don't fix it"? I'm assuming whatever they changed was "not good enough".

1

u/rem87062597 Aug 12 '15

Somewhat related, but they wrote a really interesting article about Node.

1

u/novagenesis Aug 12 '15

Somewhat related, I had to solve the kind of problem (not on Netflix's scale) at one point in the past. It can be ugly in any web engine. New versions of express have promoted router to a first-class citizen, so dynamic route-rebuilds can be done more cleanly now, making it less likely to create a middleware leak. That said, it's a lesson I intend to take to my team because it may be relevant to use sometime. Repeatedly adding the same middleware is bad because node doesn't know to magically collapse the repeated middleware.