Walmart.com’s application platform is now open sourced
WalmartLabs has released the open source version of the same application platform that was originally powering the Walmart.com website. This new development has enhanced the tech division’s presence in the open source community. The division had already designed several projects for the developer community.
Dubbed as Electrode, the application platform has been backing Walmart.com over the last year. It not only accomplished the migration to React and Node.js but also made the e-commerce site capable of handling 80 million monthly visitors and delivering 15 million items for sale.
“With over a few hundred engineers and dozens of applications, the Electrode platform was built to solve core problems that every large-scale organisation faces,” wrote Alexander Grigoryan, director of software engineering at Walmart Global, in a Medium post.
Walmart’s Electrode platform comes in three different parts to let developers easily build their universal apps on React and Node.js. These three parts include Electrode Core, Electrode Modules and Electrode Tools.
While the core component of the application platform enables the development of a consistent structure, its modules counterpart gives access to prepackaged modules to integrate into any existing apps and make them efficient enough to handle complex tasks and features. The third and the most important section of the platform is the tools that give reusable components such as Explorer, Electrify and Bundle Analyser to help optimise JavaScript bundles.
The Electrode platform is already powering various fields on the Walmart.com site. Sections like Home, Login, Cart and Checkout are so far managed by the open
source offering. Besides, WalmartLabs plans to move SamsClub.com and Walmart Grocery to the scalable solution in the near future.
“Among server-side rendered pages, the home page is now 20 per cent faster and the login page is 15 per cent faster. The checkout page, which is client-side rendered, is 20 per cent faster. Pages that were client-side rendered and are now server-side rendered have seen performance improvements of up to 30 per cent. Furthermore, our JavaScript bundle size has decreased by 20 per cent,” Grigoryan said.