Airbnb is an online marketplace in the hospitality industry. The members of the platform can use the platform as the service to arrange homestays and lodging for tourism experience. It does not personally have any real estate listing, and it merely acts as a broker receiving a commission from every booking the customers make through the platform. Airbnb is more like a hotel booking website with some extra features like membership. In comparison to a product website, Airbnb is relatively less complicated and lightweight. If you are willing to develop such a website, it is important to know the programming languages Airbnb has used to get an understanding.

The History of AirBnB –

Airbnb started as airbednadbreakfast. More than the website, it is the idea that has made the company popular. Therefore, unlike other websites, here the idea comes first and the web development is secondary. However, the pleasant user interface of Airbnb has made a great appeal to the audiences especially the new ones. It works from two ends – the guests who are searching for places to stay and hosts who are listing their place to stay. Guests are able to make a booking for homes, apartments, boats, castles, private rooms, private island, tree houses, manors and likewise. It was launched in 2008, and in 2011, it added secondary insurance offering called host guarantee that covers theft, vandalism, property damage and likewise. In the same year, the social connections feature was added which let the guests see if they have common friends with the host via Facebook.

During the initial development, it is said that Airbnb used simple HTML, JavaScript, and PHP. But with success for the idea, the company swiftly made the transition from PHP to Ruby on Rails. In fact, Airbnb has the amalgamation of the latest programming languages and technologies, and it is always a topic of discussion among the programming language community. In 2014, Airbnb made a huge change in their design both the website as well as the mobile app.

The Technology Stack and The Programming Language –

Main Language – If there is one programming language to define Airbnb it has to be Ruby on Rails. In fact, there are many companies that came into existence after Airbnb who used Ruby on Rails over python for their development. The reason for choosing Ruby on Rails framework is to speed up development and to reduce the cost of the development as the founders wanted to invest more in other parameters to make the company bigger.

JavaScript – If there is another programming language to be named after Ruby on Rails for Airbnb, it has to be JavaScript. JavaScript was very basis during the launch of Airbnb, but in the last decade, the programming language has grown by leaps and bounds with robust frameworks and new features. As for the JavaScript, Airbnb uses ReactJS as the framework. It is actually a JavaScript UI library, and it is highly flexible and efficient, and the front end is made up of ReactJS. It is needless to mention that HTML 5 and CSS 3 are there and there is also heavy use of jQuery. jQuery is used for creating the calendar, the uploading system, table views, and likewise. Moreover, there is evidence of the usage of Node.js for various services available on the platform.

Web Server – This is probably the most important aspect of Airbnb. A platform like Airbnb can be made in various programming languages such as PHP, Python, Java, ASP.net and likewise. But the ability to handle such huge traffic is what makes a website stand out in the crowd. Nginx is the web server Airbnb has opted for. It is powerful, and it uses a proxy server to speed up content delivery. Moreover, it keeps the platform secure, and there is the huge scope of scalability. Nginx is used by major websites in the world such as Instagram, Netflix, Zappos just to name a few. Beside Airbnb uses Redis for key-value storage as a caching infrastructure to boost the speed of interaction between web server and database.

Could Storage – It is needless to say that websites have completely moved to cloud storage because of the security, convenience, and speed. Airbnb uses Amazon S3 and EBS for cloud storage. For the cloud hosting, it has opted for Amazon EC2 which is the most efficient tool that can distribute traffic during sudden spikes. Therefore, the site will never experience lag and breakdown. As for the cloud database, it is using Amazon RDS. Previously, it used MySQL, but RDS has simplified administration and routine works.

Big Data Tools – Airbnb has a tremendous amount of user data, and it keeps on increasing every day starting from user registration, interaction to listing staying places by the hosts. Airbnb uses the trio of Presto, Druid, and Airpal for storing, processing, analyzing and managing all data efficiently.

Airbnb is a perfect example of how a website should be built with all the right and modern tools, technologies, and programming languages.

Kitty Gupta
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