Yogesh, I believe, sent me a link to this interesting article about LinkedIn’s new mobile app. I haven’t personally used the app (although I am on LinkedIn), but the article paints an intriguing picture. Although the app was not written in HTML5, it does make use of HTML5 for better performance. They’ve also minimized the amount of data that must be transmitted back and forth between the app and the server, which is better not just for the end users (especially the international ones) but also for the server. Speaking of which, the LinkedIn mobile team swapped out the Ruby on Rails-based server-side for one using the increasingly-popular Node.js (server-side JavaScript). If I read the article correctly, these changes allowed them to cut down from 15 servers with 15 virtual machines on each, to just four virtual machines.
My thanks to Yogesh for passing this along to me!
