WalmartLabs has released the open source version of the same application platform that was originally powering Walmart.com website. This new development has expanded the presence of the tech division, which has 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 just resulted in the accomplishment of migrating 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,” writes 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 consistent structure, its modules counterpart gives access to pre-packaged 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 Walmart.com site. Sections like home, login, cart and checkout are so far managed by the open source offering. Moreover, WalmartLabs is in plans to move SamsClub.com and Walmart Grocery to the scalable solution in the coming future.
“Among server-side rendered pages, the home page is now 20 percent faster and the login page is 15 percent faster. The checkout page, which is client-side rendered, is 20 percent faster. Pages that were client-side rendered and are now server-side rendered have seen performance improvements of up to 30 percent. Furthermore, our JavaScript bundle size has decreased by 20 percent,” Grigoryan reveals.
Developers can test the prime features of Electrode by accessing its code from the GitHub repository. Apart from this new solution, WalmartLabs holds more than 140 distinct open source projects to provide its developments to various enterprises all around the world.
