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Developer/founder of Forward here, happy to answer questions about what it is, why, how, and take critical feedback. Devs complain endlessly about the rigid, c

Developer/founder of Forward here, happy to answer questions about what it is, why, how, and take critical feedback. Devs complain endlessly about the rigid, complex mess of e-commerce software. I'm trying to change that with a platform that is easy to understand and customize by developers. We've had a lot of success so far with early projects like http://jellyfishart.com http://jellyfishart.com. MongoDB has been a huge help.

davedx 14y ago
I'd love to hear a bit more detail about how MongoDB helped with the project.
- ericingram 14y ago
  In Forward, MongoDB makes custom features easier by allowing each template to store data in different ways, without doing any database migrations or really thinking too hard about schema design. The Forward data model operates on certain fields it knows about, but allows other fields to be saved/searched in the same way. For example: {put [custom_field => "Blue"] in "/products/123"} {get $product from "/products/123"} Value is: {$product.custom_field} You can also search for that value... {get $blue_products from "/products" [search => [custom_field => "Blue"]]} While you could accomplish this with a SQL database also, it wouldn't be as easy to read, and probably slower. Performance in early projects has been phenomenal with MongoDB.
  - davedx 14y ago
    Thanks for the explanation!
burningion 14y ago
The layout is great, very clean, great job. That said, how do you deal with transactions? It was my impression that MongoDB doesn't really support ACID transactions. Did you find a workaround? I know from prior experience working on a major eCommerce store that there can be really taxing loads on the database server, right around Black Friday, and having inconsistent writes could really be disastrous. Have you tested your transactions for consistency under load?
- ericingram 14y ago
  To start, I will say we haven't run into any issues relating to consistency under load. We do have a plan for dealing with it, using an optimistic locking mechanism (where each document has a revision number and an update requires it), but as an early project we haven't had the chance to put it up against high load for a long period of time. Also, I'm pretty confident MongoDB is going to introduce an easier mechanism for document locking in the near future.
  - jeremyking 14y ago
    It's difficult to find the right back-end solution that can easily scale with a business and demand. I saw this post a month ago and think it looks pretty promising and might be something you could take advantage of here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719 Currently it's in alpha testing and promises multi-key ACID transactions. And also introduces a really interesting layers concept. http://www.foundationdb.com/#layers http://www.foundationdb.com/#layers Keep up the great work!
tommccabe 14y ago
Seems really interesting and promising. In terms of the e-commerce landscape, do you think that this is a competitor to the smaller-mid level platforms, e.g. Magento or Opencart, or do you expect that this can scale up to enterprise level systems and compete with ATG, Demandware, and IBM WebSphere?
- ericingram 14y ago
  Good question. Forward will start at the small-med level because that's where our experience lies. Today we see it as comparable to the early Magento, but more developer friendly. Time will tell, and we are very interested in offering an open source product and service that will compare with the likes of Demandware.
deleted 14y ago
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davedx 14y ago

I'd love to hear a bit more detail about how MongoDB helped with the project.

ericingram 14y ago
In Forward, MongoDB makes custom features easier by allowing each template to store data in different ways, without doing any database migrations or really thinking too hard about schema design. The Forward data model operates on certain fields it knows about, but allows other fields to be saved/searched in the same way. For example: {put [custom_field => "Blue"] in "/products/123"} {get $product from "/products/123"} Value is: {$product.custom_field} You can also search for that value... {get $blue_products from "/products" [search => [custom_field => "Blue"]]} While you could accomplish this with a SQL database also, it wouldn't be as easy to read, and probably slower. Performance in early projects has been phenomenal with MongoDB.
- davedx 14y ago
  Thanks for the explanation!

burningion 14y ago

The layout is great, very clean, great job. That said, how do you deal with transactions? It was my impression that MongoDB doesn't really support ACID transactions. Did you find a workaround? I know from prior experience working on a major eCommerce store that there can be really taxing loads on the database server, right around Black Friday, and having inconsistent writes could really be disastrous. Have you tested your transactions for consistency under load?

ericingram 14y ago
To start, I will say we haven't run into any issues relating to consistency under load. We do have a plan for dealing with it, using an optimistic locking mechanism (where each document has a revision number and an update requires it), but as an early project we haven't had the chance to put it up against high load for a long period of time. Also, I'm pretty confident MongoDB is going to introduce an easier mechanism for document locking in the near future.
- jeremyking 14y ago
  It's difficult to find the right back-end solution that can easily scale with a business and demand. I saw this post a month ago and think it looks pretty promising and might be something you could take advantage of here. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4294719 Currently it's in alpha testing and promises multi-key ACID transactions. And also introduces a really interesting layers concept. http://www.foundationdb.com/#layers http://www.foundationdb.com/#layers Keep up the great work!

tommccabe 14y ago

Seems really interesting and promising. In terms of the e-commerce landscape, do you think that this is a competitor to the smaller-mid level platforms, e.g. Magento or Opencart, or do you expect that this can scale up to enterprise level systems and compete with ATG, Demandware, and IBM WebSphere?

ericingram 14y ago
Good question. Forward will start at the small-med level because that's where our experience lies. Today we see it as comparable to the early Magento, but more developer friendly. Time will tell, and we are very interested in offering an open source product and service that will compare with the likes of Demandware.

deleted 14y ago

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