Hey guys Ayaan here, and welcome to web review.

This week we are going to take a deeper look at what makes it tick, and explore one of the most unique backends I've ever seen.

This week we are going to take a look at the Razorpay website!

We can't just jump into the tastiest part of the dish yet, let's savour this meal.

• Frontend

  1. Website ->

     Razorpay had humble beginnings as an API gateway for developers to enable payments, they then decided to make a website where they leveraged the tricks of the trade they developed and became enormously successful.

     The website is likely built using React.js as well as its own UI builder tools used for designing as well as acting as a scaffold for the website. It's pretty nice to see that companies invest in their UI builder tools rather than relying on Figma.

     (This post was made by a person who dislikes Adobe's pricing system).

     

     Although most people treat React as the entryway to the web development industry, I believe that it is nonetheless a robust system that has enormous potential IF built the right way. It does have its issues, if you are careless you can render your application a bloated mess and every developer is aware of the fact that too many packages lead to too many react version requirements, which clash often.

  Backbone.JS

  I also came across a very interesting package called backbone.js, which gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface. This is mind-bogglingly more useful than having to reinvent the wheel, and I will personally be checking it out.

  Overall the website is well built using super basic components to get the point across and I can appreciate that in a website.

  2. Mobile ->

     The mobile version of the application is quite young compared to the rest of its services, it was built using React Native in TypeScript, this both upsets me and makes me happy as I love typescript simply because of its optimizations as well as a small learning curve if you had experience with javascript.

     I do not like React Native as a platform, now you may be questioning this fact as in both of the other blog posts I advocated for cross-platform development. React Native is simply harsh to developers when it comes to sparse and outdated documentation, plugins and you would think that knowledge of React would help you at least in understanding concepts of React Native and that couldn't be further from the truth.

     

     The app leverages the in-house design system so that it alleviates some of the problems from the React Native design platform. Codepush and Bitrise are very helpful add-ons, that simulate the hot reload mechanism of developing a website application and also Jenkin's Automated testing framework.

Now for the moment, I've been hyping everyone for

• Backend

  1. Laravel ->

     I may anger some of the javascript purists, but I'll say it. Maintenance-wise; the backend in javascript is absolute hell, there are so many better alternatives like using Golang and Laravel Octave that are faster and addresses several components differently.

     I was originally a Node.JS fanatic and I still think it's a solid foundation, but Laravel (i.e: PHP) is a better alternative. Some examples of where Laravel excels are a well-built ORM, web-socket programming and built-in authentication. Since it is so well established, there are very good implementations of several notable APIs.I would suggest new developers not sleep on PHP, just on the false assumption that it is old or inefficient.

     

  Remember, anything can become good with time and the correct setup

  2. Ruby ->

     Hey Ruby on Rails, 2015 called and it wants its code back!

     Jokes aside I am still surprised that Ruby on Rails is as prevalent as it is in this year, so much so that I went on a journey to learn why it is still popular. Turns out the only reason why people believe that Ruby on Rails is dying is that it does have scalability and performance issues (Which can be fixed, please don't crucify me Ruby devs).

     That being the case it is still used by massive companies like Github, Shopify and Coinbase; I can see that some of these companies' components can utilise Ruby.Especially Github which uses Ruby for the design of GitHub’s online apps.

     As to what components Ruby on Rails uses would be subjective and it would take up a different part of the controller architecture, perhaps due to its ease of coding it would be better suited to work more closely with the view portion of the MVC compared to Laravel, which has eloquent ORM to make the communication between the model portion of the MVC more human readable.

  3. Scala ->

     According to my own conception, Scala would be classified as a 4th generation language with these languages gaining traction like Rust or GO; Sadly unlike its peers Scala does not have the same popularity in fact it shares some distaste because of its parentage.

     

     I do not particularly enjoy coding in Java but I can recognise its importance, there has been a worrying trend of young engineers abandoning Java for the next big thing. Which in my mind is the most foolish thing you can ever do.

     Scala will be the first well-developed alternative we will have to Java, but sadly due to my inexperience, I am unaware as to where they would use it in an MVC architecture. My theory is that they may be utilising Scala-native to aim for a high-performance system.

  4. GraphQL ->

     One of the first ever personal web projects I made used GraphQL and for good reason, making API calls was getting tedious as hell and GraphQL was extremely helpful.

     One of the advantages of GraphQL is it allows you to build out an API without making as many assumptions about a client's use case or when you have multiple clients with conflicting use cases. And yet it still gets hate and I don't really get it, which is the complete opposite case of Laravel for me.

     No more custom rest endpoints with whatever query params the team and engineer felt like implementing at the time, but a consistent more uniform interface based on the schema.

• Databases

  1. Cassandra ->

     I remember first coming across Cassandra while researching NoSQL databases for a project in my DBMS seminar; it was a surprise to be sure that Reddit of all things used Cassandra, but it was a welcome one ;)

     The consensus is that Cassandra is not the best at what it does, but the methods it utilises are tight and simple. Since it is a distributed NoSQL database it is highly scalable and prevents SPOF. I dare anyone to find one service that doesnt cater to Cassandra due to it being extensively used.

     This partitioning paradigm is the key to Cassandra’s fast write speed and a key tradeoff to consider compared to a relational database. Cassandra can be classified into the AP category of the CAP theorem as it satisfies availability and partition tolerance.

  2. DynamoDB ->

     Contrary to what I believed, DynamoDB and Cassandra are both wide-column-store.From the Dynamo paper, you would assume that it is a key store, but the DynamoDB service provided by AWS is not a key store.

     

     AWS itself describes DynamoDB as a "document store", but that's bad too. They're referencing that it doesn't enforce a schema (which is a key difference from Cassandra). However, I think it misses the capability of arbitrary indexes within the document.

     Let's play a variation of two truths and one lie, let's call it two goodies and one disappointment; It is serverless, data replication but it has a weak querying model. Since both of these services fulfil a similar purpose, I suppose Razorpay may be using them to compensate each other's failures.

Final Score

Backend Score -> 8.5/10

The backend is interesting and it would be so awesome to work on it, on the other hand having to manage the different parts of it would require an extremely talented backend developer team as well as handle the communication between them.

Frontend Score -> 7.5/10

The frontend is very reliable and simple, it gets the point across but the fact that it uses React and React Native means that they may have to face some issues while developing it. Got to give it plus points for having its UI component builder.

This might be a divisive score, but I have given it to the best of my ability.

Database Score -> 8/10

A solid database combination (which also "might" be using PostgreSQL to handle RDBMS functions), where you can't go wrong. I would love to hear how Razorpay can handle the massive amount of transactions happening every day.

Soon enough I will have exhausted web review topics that would be unique to a certain point I am looking into starting a blog post called BREAK IT DOWN, to analyse the gritty aspects of the systems we take for granted.