LinkedIn Enhances Developer Productivity with Play Framework Integration
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Country
- United States
Product
- Play Framework
- Typesafe Platform
- Apache Avro
Tech Stack
- Java
- Scala
- RESTful JSON
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
Applicable Industries
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Control
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
LinkedIn is a publicly held company that operates the world’s largest professional network on the Internet, boasting over 160 million members across more than 200 countries and territories. As a Typesafe customer, LinkedIn has been utilizing Scala for its core social network graph and other critical components of its product. The company has also released open-source projects based on Scala, such as Norbert, a cluster management solution, and Kafka, a distributed publish-subscribe system. Scala is a part of Typesafe's flagship product, the Typesafe Platform. Recently, LinkedIn expanded its use of the Typesafe Platform to include the Play web framework, aiming to enhance its development processes and improve scalability.
The Challenge
LinkedIn faced challenges with traditional Java web frameworks, which were time-consuming and inefficient for developers. The existing frameworks required a lengthy process to make changes, reload, and test, leading to wasted developer time. Additionally, stateful, thread-per-request frameworks performed poorly and were difficult to scale, resulting in inefficient use of cloud resources. While LinkedIn used some non-Java platforms like Ruby on Rails or node.js, the majority of their server-side code was written in Java. Therefore, they needed a modern UI framework that could cater to Java developers and improve their productivity.
The Solution
LinkedIn adopted the Play Framework, a component of the Typesafe Platform, to address their challenges. Play is a modern framework for the JVM that focuses on developer productivity and supports both Java and Scala, allowing LinkedIn to choose the best language for their needs. By using the Java API, LinkedIn ensured a smooth transition for their developers. Play was deployed as a front-end server for UI development, with applications like Talent Direct benefiting from its capabilities. LinkedIn plans to expand Play's adoption as they develop new features and are considering it for backend services as they transition to a RESTful JSON architecture. Play's dynamic recompilation feature allows developers to save changes, reload the browser, and see immediate results, significantly reducing development time. The framework's extensibility allows LinkedIn to support new asset types and integrate with their existing REST framework using Apache Avro. Play's asynchronous and stateless design enhances scalability, allowing LinkedIn to efficiently manage server resources and easily add capacity by increasing application servers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Infosys achieves a 5–7 percent effort reduction across projects
Infosys, a global leader in consulting, technology, and outsourcing solutions, was facing significant challenges in application development and maintenance due to its distributed teams, changing business priorities and the need to stay in alignment with customer needs. The company used a mix of open source, home-grown and third-party applications to support application development projects. However, challenges resulting from distributed teams using manual processes increased as the company grew. It became more and more important for Infosys to execute its projects efficiently, so they could improve quality, reduce defects and minimize delays.
Case Study
Arctic Wolf Envelops Teamworks with 24x7 Cybersecurity Protection and Comprehensive Visibility
Teamworks, a leading athlete engagement platform, faced rising cyberthreats and needed enhanced visibility into its network, servers, and laptops. With software developers connecting from all over the world, the company sought to improve its security posture and position itself for future growth. The company had a secure platform but recognized the need for a more proactive solution to identify gaps within its technology infrastructure. Data exfiltration and malicious access were top concerns, prompting the need for a comprehensive security upgrade.
Case Study
Sawback IT and Datto Save Client From a Costly Mistake
Ballistic Echo, a software development house, faced a critical challenge when human error led to the deletion of thousands of lines of unique code. This incident occurred before the code was pushed to source control, resulting in significant loss of time, revenue, and work. The previous file-level backup solution they used was slow and inefficient, making it nearly impossible to manually recreate the lost work. The need for a more reliable and efficient business continuity solution became evident to avoid such disasters in the future.
Case Study
Opal Helps Customers Shine Thanks to Datto
SP Flooring & Design Center faced a ransomware attack that encrypted and locked their files. The attack was initiated through a compromised service account set up by an outside vendor. The ransomware infection was isolated quickly, but there was a concern about the extent of the data at risk. The company had backups in place but was unsure of how much information was compromised. The situation required immediate action to prevent further damage and restore the affected data.
Case Study
Zapier Aggregates Multiple Analytics in a Single Dashboard with the New Relic Platform
Zapier, a company that enables non-technical users to push data between hundreds of web applications, was facing a challenge in automating and provisioning servers for optimal performance. The company's environment consisted of 50 Linux servers on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Django application split across several servers, and a backend consisting of a dynamic number of celery task workers fed by messages published to a RabbitMQ cluster. They also maintained a number of internal web services on nginx in front of Gunicorn and Node.js processes. Redis handled simple key and value stores, with logging handled by Graylog2 and ElasticSearch. However, they realized that no level of automation would be sufficient without an effective monitoring solution in place. They needed a tool that could provide immediate alerts when something was breaking and could be easily implemented into their environment.
Case Study
Pipeline Insight Case Study: YARCDATA
YarcData faced challenges in determining the conversion rates of prospects into customers through various marketing efforts and identifying the source of its leads. They wanted to know the percentage of opportunities in the sales pipeline that came from different marketing events, web downloads, or self-sourced sales opportunities. Additionally, they needed the ability to drill down into the data to guide where to allocate more marketing dollars based on the success of previous efforts. Previously, YarcData relied heavily on spreadsheets and Salesforce.com reports, which made it difficult to extract the exact information they needed. This reliance on spreadsheets represented about 70% of their data presentation.
