LinkedIn has launched a new mobile app, and it’s offering a peek at what went on behind the scenes in the creation of that app. The mobile development team switched from Ruby on Rails to Node.js, which made the app 2 to 10 times faster on the client side. In addition, the team re-used a lot of HTML5 code from the Web app in the native apps. “There’s this battle between HTML5 Web apps and native apps. But we’ve interspersed HTML5 in the native app, where Web-based content excels. The things that are hard to do in HTML5 are a scrolling infinite list, so we went native with that,” explained LinkedIn’s mobile development lead Kiran Prasad.
Prasad also said that the development time on the project was very short and that the finished app is very lightweight — under 50K zipped.