How eBay developed their first Node.js application?

eBay is known all over the world for how ardently it supports the Java and its counterparts. Therefore, it becomes a question of great curiosity that how the company decided to get some applications build using Node.js. Well, the story began with a hackathon project named “Talk”. Some engineers from eBay were participating in this competition when they found out that JAVA was not suitable for the requirements. This is when they started to explore Node.js and found out it to be a great solution. 

The two major reasons why Node.js was selected:

• The main focus was to make the application as real time as possible. It was necessary to maintain live connections with the server and Node.js was the way to achieve this functionality. 
• The second requirement was to handle I/O bound operations as a large number of eBay services are required to display information on the page. For this operation, JAVA was consuming more resources than expected. Therefore switching to Node.js seemed to be the right option. 
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The aim was to develop a minimum boilerplate Node.js server that could be scale up and down as per the requirements. The team at eBay was not interested to bloat the entire application using any framework. Mongo DB was used for data persistence as it offered an easy way to do so. The front end servers of the eBay were pointed to Node.js servers and then the coding part was started. 

Once the app reached a stable phase, the next task was to look into the deployment of Node.js stack. The deployment process of the Node.js turned out to be very simple. You can build the application and deploy it anywhere. 

Currently, the Node.js is supporting some of the great front end features including the management of resources, tracking, and L10N. It’s like a dream come true for the front end engineers bat eBay.