Summary

Scaling a JavaScript application isn't the same as scaling other types of applications. Although we can use JavaScript to create large-scale backend services, our concern is with scaling the applications our users interact with in the browser. And there're a number of influencers that guide our decision making process on producing an architecture that scales.

We reviewed some of these influencers, and how they flow in a top-down fashion, creating challenges unique to frontend JavaScript development. We examined the effect of more users, more features, and more developers; we can see that there's a lot to think about. While the browser is becoming a powerful platform, onto which we're delivering our applications, it still has constraints not found on other platforms.

Designing and implementing a scalable JavaScript application requires having an architecture. What the software must ultimately do is just one input to that design. The scaling influencers are key as well. From there, we address different perspectives of the architecture under consideration. Things such as component composition and responsiveness come into play when we talk about scale. These are observable aspects of our architecture that are impacted by influencers of scale.

As these scaling factors change over time, we use architectural perspectives as tools to modify our design, or the product to align with scaling challenges. The focus of the next chapter will be to look into these scaling influencers in more detail. Understanding them and putting together a checklist will empower us to implement a JavaScript that scales in response to these events.